This book would not have happened if Ann Dinsdale hadn’t shown me Anne Brontë’s last letter. I’m also hugely grateful for her expertise and scholarship, and for help from her colleagues at the Brontë Parsonage, especially Sarah Laycock, Amy Rowbottom and Charissa Hutchins. Also in Haworth I would like to thank Steven Wood for walking me across the moors and for patient and detailed responses to my many questions since. Thanks also to Julie Akhurst and Steve Brown for showing me around their home, Ponden Hall; to Jennifer Dunne and Pete Rawson at Scarborough Museums Trust for enlightening me about Anne’s pebbles; to the Reverend Christopher Parkin for letting me have a look at the Holy Trinity Church, Little Ouseburn; to Ben Butler-Cole for sailing lore; to Robert Freeman at Craven Museum and Gallery Skipton and to the staff at the British Library and the London Library for tracking down manuscripts and secondary sources.
My wonderful agent Judith Murray believed in this book from the start, as did my brilliant editor Becky Hardie, who is the perfect mix of encouragement and rigour. Also at Chatto, huge thanks to Charlotte Humphery, Kris Potter, Mari Yamazaki and Katherine Fry.
Thank you to Robert Holman for letting me quote him (again!). And thank you to all the people I’ve had useful and illuminating conversations with about Anne over the past two years, especially: Naomi Alderman, Sam Baker, Marina Benjamin, Lucy Caldwell, Maddy Costa, Lyndall Gordon, Paul King, Robert Macfarlane, Helen McColl, Shane Morgan and the cast of his production of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Amy Rosenthal, Héloïse Sénéchal, and of course my staunch and stalwart writers’ group – Robin Booth, Nick Harrop, Matt Morrison and Ben Musgrave. And thank you to my late aunt Anne Ellis, who first gave me The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.
Lastly, thanks – and love – to my parents and my brother, to my friend Emma Ayech. And most of all, to Jude Cook, for enduring many hours of driving and tramping about Yorkshire, and many nights of reading drafts, and for helping me to take courage and to expand my heart.
How To Be A Heroine
Samantha Ellis is a playwright and journalist. Her first book How To Be A Heroine was published in 2014. Her plays include Cling to Me Like Ivy, Operation Magic Carpet and How to Date a Feminist. She has written for the Guardian, Observer, TLS, Spectator, Literary Review, the Pool, Exeunt and more. She lives in London.
Anne Brontë is the forgotten Brontë sister, overshadowed by her older siblings – virtuous, successful Charlotte, free-spirited Emily and dissolute Branwell. Tragic, virginal, sweet, stoic, selfless Anne. The less talented Brontë, the other Brontë.
Or that’s what Samantha Ellis, a life-long Emily and Wuthering Heights devotee, had always thought. Until, that is, she started questioning that devotion and, in looking more closely at Emily and Charlotte, found herself confronted by Anne instead.
Take Courage is Samantha’s personal, poignant and surprising journey into the life and work of a woman sidelined by history. A brave, strongly feminist writer well ahead of her time – and her more celebrated siblings – and who has much to teach us today about how to find our way in the world.
Take courage.
I couldn’t get the words out of my head. After I returned from Scarborough, I kept thinking about Anne, and, oddly, about a saying by the eighteenth-century Hasidic mystic Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, which I remembered every time I crossed the bridge over Anne’s favourite waterfall on the moors. As I gazed down at the seething torrents, I would think about Anne picnicking here, and about Nachman’s saying that ‘The whole world is a very narrow bridge; the important thing is not to be afraid’. Nachman was a tzaddik, a Hebrew word which literally means a righteous person, but also means a person who is like a superhero or an angel, always on the side of the oppressed. Like Anne, Nachman was a storyteller, writing captivating, weird tales alongside his religious commentary. He told his followers to talk to God outdoors (where ‘all the grasses join in his prayer’), but became anxious when God didn’t talk back. Like Anne, Nachman died of TB. It occurs to me that his narrow bridge is not so different from her narrow way, and that both Nachman and Anne wanted to inspire courage but knew that courage means nothing without fear. They knew that courage is not easy to find or to hold on to, that you might, at any moment, fall off the bridge and get swept away.
Charlotte almost fell after Anne’s death, but she took courage, and forced herself to finish Shirley, and did her best to defend her sisters to their critics, and most of all, she wrote her bravest, strangest, most conflicted book. Villette, published in 1853, has become my favourite of Charlotte’s novels. She had to write it alone, with no sisters to read it, ‘no opinion from one living being’. Written ‘darkly in the silent workshop of [her] own brain’, it has no Gothic melodrama (well, all right, there is a sort of ghost) and no happy ending. Its heroine Lucy Snowe is as angry and as consumed by self-hatred as Charlotte was. The survivor of a tragedy she won’t (or can’t) talk about, she lies to the reader, she withholds key information, and she tries so hard to crush her desires that she feels like she is driving a tent peg into her own head. Villette is constricted, frustrating and unpleasant. That’s why it’s so good. Jane Eyre is an innocent book; Villette is by a woman who has lived. In Villette, Lucy has to recognise her own ardour; to admit that it can no longer be contained; to try for happiness, at last; and to recognise that there is no closure, that life isn’t always fair, that moral choices are muddy, and there are no tidy endings, let alone happy ones.
Charlotte took courage again on a ‘dim June morning’ in 1854, when she took a leap into the unknown and married Arthur Bell Nicholls, even though she wasn’t sure about him, and even though Patrick objected vehemently. Charlotte found that she could and did love Nicholls, and even hoped to have their child. But she fell prey to hyperemesis gravidarum, extreme morning sickness, and nine months after her wedding, her coffin was carried up the same aisle in Haworth’s church where she had walked as a bride.
Patrick also took his youngest daughter’s last words to heart. After Anne died, he went on the warpath, as if trying to do something his most radical, most humane, most hopeful child would have been proud of. Anne would certainly have admired the rigour and clarity with which her father identified Haworth’s biggest problem: bad water. He organised a petition to demand a water supply to every house in the village, so it wasn’t just the wealthy who got fresh water. He kept campaigning until, in April 1850, an inspector turned up. Benjamin Herschel Babbage was appalled to find that the average life expectancy was twenty-six, as bad as the poorest, most overcrowded slums of London. In some ways it’s a wonder the Brontës lived so long. Babbage’s report is, jokes Steven Wood, ‘Victorian sanitation porn’, full of lurid details about how the shortage of privies (and the fact that most had no doors) was ‘injurious to health’ and ‘repugnant to all ideas of decency’; how, because there were no sewers, waste ran down the streets. ‘Bad as is this state of things’, Babbage agrees with Patrick that ‘perhaps the most crying want of Haworth is water’. Worst of all, since the graveyard didn’t have proper drainage, the corpses were literally seeping into what water there was.
Because Babbage closed down the churchyard, and put an end to burying people inside the church, when Patrick died at eighty-four, on 7 June 1861, his parish had to get special permission from the Secretary of State to bury him with his family (apart from Anne). Even then, his coffin had to be embedded in powdered charcoal and entombed separately from the others in brick or stone. For all that this was troublesome, Patrick might have been glad. He had got what he wanted. He’d changed his world.
Nicholls took courage too, when he proposed to Charlotte. In fact, he had to keep taking courage because she rejected him at first, and because he had to defy Patrick, who didn’t want them to marry. After Charlotte died, the two men became friends, but poor Nicholls found that Haworth’s board of trustees didn’t want him to succeed Patrick. He had to sell up quickly, auctioning off everything, including the table where Anne had written her two novels. In a grand and devastated gesture, he had Charlotte’s bed destroyed. He returned to Ireland, where he said he had buried his heart with Charlotte but managed to marry a very understanding cousin. (There is a story about the famous portrait of Charlotte by George Richmond, which hung above their sofa, falling on his new wife’s head while she was having a nap, and stunning her. It might be apocryphal but it feels true.) Nicholls was badgered by Brontë fans for the rest of his life.
As for the question Anne articulated for me, ‘What, Where, and How Shall I Be When I Have Got Through?’, I have been trying. Though she no longer appears in my dreams, I have been trying to grasp the thorn. To find my narrow way and stick to it. To write a new story when I don’t like the one I’m given. To expand my heart. To take courage.
On honeymoon in Ireland, we take a detour to Banagher, in County Offaly, where Charlotte spent her honeymoon. It is February, very cold and pretty bleak, and almost everything is closed, including the Friends of Asthma charity shop, and a multi-purpose establishment called William Lyons which seems to be not just a ‘Lounge Bar’ but also a wool buyer and seller of fishing rods and firearms. Nicholls’s old house is now a bed and breakfast called Charlotte’s Way. In the churchyard, we try and fail to find Nicholls’s grave. I remember Charlotte writing to her friend Margaret Wooler from Banagher to say, ‘My dear husband … appears in a new light in his own country.’ Having been so wary of marrying him she now feels glad she has made ‘what seems a right choice’.
As we leave Banagher, the sun breaks through for a moment and the River Shannon gleams gold in the twilight, and I can see how Charlotte would have been happy here. But then the clouds come down again, like the lid on a saucepan; sleet falls, and on the motorway, deep fog descends. We can only see a few metres ahead, just beyond the beam of the headlights. The sun is setting; soon it will be dark. My new husband is driving, I am navigating. And all we can do is keep going, hope that more of the road will become visible, hope to get to where we’re going, hope we like it when we do, and try to be brave.
And now, to quote Anne, I think I have said sufficient.
When quoting from Anne Brontë’s books I have used the following editions:
The Poems of Anne Brontë: A New Text and Commentary by Anne Brontë, edited by Edward Chitham (Macmillan, Basingstoke and London, 1979)
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë, edited by Stevie Davies (Penguin, London, 1996)
Agnes Grey by Anne Brontë, edited by Angeline Goreau (Penguin, London, 2004)
For her sisters’ work, I have used:
The Professor, Tales from Angria, Poems etc by The Brontës, edited by Phyllis Bentley (Collins, London, 1966)
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (Norton, New York, 2001)
Shirley by Charlotte Brontë, edited by Andrew and Judith Hook (Penguin, London, 1994)
Villette by Charlotte Brontë, edited by Sally Minogue (Wordsworth, Hertfordshire, 1993)
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, edited by David Daiches (Penguin, London, 1965)
The Complete Poems by Emily Brontë, edited by Janet Gezari (Penguin, London, 1992)
When quoting from the letters, I have used The Letters of Charlotte Brontë: with a selection of letters by family and friends, edited by Margaret Smith, Volumes 1–3 (Oxford University Press, 1995–2004). However, the Brontës’ spelling and punctuation are famously haphazard, so, following the example of some previous writers on the Brontës, I have clarified it where I can.
The reviews of Anne and her sisters’ works are all from The Brontës: The Critical Heritage, edited by Miriam Allott (Routledge & Kegan Paul, Oxford, 1974).
I owe much to Juliet Barker’s impeccably researched group biography, The Brontës (Abacus, London, 2010), to Lucasta Miller’s The Brontë Myth (Vintage, London, 2000) which dismantles some of the oldest, hoariest stories about the family, and to The Art of the Brontës by Christine Alexander and Jane Sellars (Cambridge University Press, 1995) which rewards their art with the close attention that has been paid to their writing.
It’s impossible to write about the Brontës without grappling with Elizabeth Gaskell, who got there first, in The Life of Charlotte Brontë (London, Penguin, 1998). I found Ann Dinsdale’s book with Mark Davis, In the Footsteps of the Brontës (Amberley, Stroud, 2013), very helpful in getting a sense of place. I also found The Brontë Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects by Deborah Lutz (Norton, New York, 2015) very useful in thinking about the Brontës’ things.
On Anne specifically, Winifred Gérin’s Anne Brontë: a Biography (Penguin, London, 1976) is indispensable, and Elizabeth Langland’s Anne Brontë: The Other One (Macmillan, Basingstoke and London, 1989) is a fantastic short overview of the life and work. Other useful works on Anne are: A Life of Anne Brontë by Edward Chitham (Blackwell, Oxford, 1991); Anne Brontë – Her Life and Work by Ada Harrison and Derek Stanford (Methuen, London, 1959); Anne Brontë: A New Critical Assessment by P. J. M. Scott (Vision, London, 1983); and Anne Brontë: her life and writings by Will T. Hale (Indiana University Press, 1929).
In the Introduction, I used Louisa May Alcott: Her Life, Letters and Journals, edited by Ednah Cheney (Roberts Brothers, Boston, 1889), and Little Women: an annotated edition by Louisa May Alcott, edited by Daniel Shealy (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachussets, 2013). I learned about the marginalia in Anne’s Bible from ‘Contextualising Anne Brontë’s Bible’ by Maria Frawley, in New Approaches to the Literary Art of Anne Brontë, edited by Julie Nash and Barbara A. Suess (Routledge, Oxford, 2001); Anne’s Bible is in the Morgan Library & Museum in New York.
In Chapter 1, on Maria, Hermione Lee’s Virginia Woolf (Vintage, London, 1997) helped me think back through To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (Penguin, London, 1992). ‘The Advantages of Poverty in Religious Concerns’ by Maria Brontë is reprinted in The Brontës: Life and Letters by Clement Shorter (Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1908). I read Caroline Norton’s letter to Queen Victoria at http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/norton/alttq/alttq.html, and found Diane Atkinson’s biography, The Criminal Conversation of Mrs Norton (Preface, London, 2012), very useful, as well as Norton’s novel Lost and Saved (Hurst & Blackett, London, 1863). For a startling overview into how all the mothers in Gothic novels are dead or imprisoned, I was fascinated by ‘The Missing Mother: The Meanings of Maternal Absence in the Gothic Mode’ by Ruth Bienstock Anolik, in Modern Language Studies, Volume 33, Number 1 (2003). Laura C. Berry’s ‘Acts of Custody and Incarceration in Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall’ in NOVEL, Volume 30, Number 1 (1996) helped me understand the trap Norton finds herself in. Mary, a fiction; and The Wrongs of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft, edited by Gary Kelly (Oxford University Press, 1976), is a liberating read.
In Chapter 2, on Elizabeth, I looked at May Sinclair’s intense The Three Brontës (Hutchinson & Co., London, 1912). ‘The Brontës’ by Marianne Thormählen, in The Blackwell Companion to the Bible in English Literature, edited by Rebecca Lemon and others (Blackwell, Oxford, 2009), was very helpful in thinking through Anne’s beliefs, as was The Brontës and Religion by Marianne Thormählen (Cambridge University Press, 1999). For an alternative view, I was usefully challenged by ‘Exiled and Harassed Anne’ by Ernest Raymond, in Brontë Society Transactions, Volume 11, Issue 4 (1949), and ‘The Drug-Like Brontë Dream’ by Margaret Lane, in Brontë Society Transactions, Volume 12, Issue 2 (1952). Jonathan Raban’s wonderful Passage to Juneau (Picador, London, 2000) was very useful in thinking about Cowper; the true story of the storm is in A Voyage Round the World by George Anson (Heron Books, Geneva, 1923). Jeanette Winterson’s story about Jane Eyre is in her memoir, Why be Happy When You Could be Normal? (Vintage, London, 2012).
In Chapter 3, on Tabby, I was lucky to be able to benefit from Steven Wood’s extraordinary scholarship on Haworth and the moors; his latest book, The Real Wuthering Heights: The Story of the Withins Farms by Steven Wood and Peter Brears (Amberley, Stroud, 2016), is a useful corrective to many of the myths about Top Withins. The Moor: Lives, Landscape, Literature by William Atkins (Faber & Faber, London, 2014) was very helpful on the bog burst. Of the many guides to Haworth and the moors, I enjoyed The Perfect Companion: The First Authentic Guidebook to Bronteland [sic] in the History of the Yorkshire Dales by Frank Thompson (Frank Thompson Classic Publications, Haworth, 1978), A Springtime Saunter: Round and About Brontë Land by Whiteley Turner (Halifax Courier, 1913), and Halliwell Sutcliffe’s essay ‘The Spirit of the Moors’, in Brontë Society Transactions, Volume 2, Issue 13 (1903). It was a huge pleasure to reread The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett (Heinemann, London, 1976). The Grasmere and Alfoxden Journals by Dorothy Wordsworth, edited by Pamela Woof (Oxford University Press, 2002) is fabulous, as is The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth by Frances Wilson (Faber & Faber, London, 2008). ‘From Simianized Irish to Oriental Despots: Heathcliff, Rochester and Racial Difference’ by Elsie Michie, in NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Volume 25, Issue 2 (1992), was useful on Victorian racism towards the Irish. ‘Tabitha Aykroyd’ by C. Mabel Edgerley, in Brontë Society Transactions, Volume 10, Issue 2 (1941), was helpful on Tabby (although some of her conjectures have now been challenged) as was Ann Dinsdale’s very clear and up-to-date At Home with the Brontës (Amberley, Stroud, 2013). Florence White’s Good Things in England (Persephone, London, 1999) is a joy.
In Chapter 4, on Emily, Stevie Davies’s Emily Brontë: Heretic (The Woman’s Press, London, 1994) hugely influenced my approach. Tales of Glasstown, Angria and Gondal: Selected Writings, by the Brontës, edited by Christine Alexander (Oxford World’s Classics, Oxford, 2010) is fantastic. For attempts to synthesise the Gondal stories, The Brontës’ Web of Childhood by Fannie E. Ratchford (Russell & Russell, New York, 1964), Gondal’s Queen: a novel in verse by Emily Jane Brontë, arranged, with an introduction and notes by Fannie E. Ratchford (University of Texas Press, Austin, 1955), and An Investigation of Gondal by W. D. Paden (Bookman Associates, New York, 1958), are all interesting. Rebecca West’s essay ‘The Role of Fantasy in the Work of the Brontës’, in Brontë Society Transactions, Volume 12, Issue 64 (1954), is very powerful. The Brontës Went to Woolworths by Rachel Ferguson (Ernest Benn, London, 1931) is both fun and fascinating. I relied on Becoming Queen by Kate Williams (Hutchinson, London, 2008) to find out about the early life of Queen Victoria, and also on The Adventures of Alice Laselles by Alexandrina Victoria (Royal Collection Trust, London, 2015). Virginia Moore’s The Life and Eager Death of Emily Brontë, a biography (Rich & Cowan, London, 1936) is a revealing read. Antonia Forest’s Peter’s Room (Faber, London, 1978) is a joy. Stassa Edwards’s ‘The Animalistic Emily Brontë’ is at http://the-toast.net/2014/06/10/the-animalistic-emily-bronte/ For the stories from John Greenwood, I consulted Albert H. Preston’s ‘John Greenwood and The Brontës’, in Brontë Society Transactions, Volume 12, Issue 1 (1951). The story of the woman inspired by Anne’s novel to leave her marriage is ‘Abuse inside Christian marriages – a personal story’ by Isabella Young in the Sydney Morning Herald, 2 March 2015. To learn more about Ellen Nussey, I read ‘Reminiscences of the Late Ellen Nussey’ by William Scruton, in Brontë Society Transactions, Volume 1, Issue 8 (1898), as well as Nussey’s own ‘Reminiscences of Charlotte Brontë’ in Scribner’s Monthly (1871). ‘The Brontës and the Conmen’ by Mark Bostridge, in the TLS, 30 September 2015, clarified much about Shorter and Wise. For more on the formidable Mary Taylor, read ‘More Precious than Rubies’: Mary Taylor, Friend of Charlotte Brontë, Strong-Minded Woman by Joan Bellamy (Highgate of Beverley, 2002). Mary Taylor’s novel Miss Miles, or a tale of Yorkshire life 60 years ago (Remington & Co., London, 1890) is also excellent.
In Chapter 5, on Charlotte, I loved Charlotte Brontë: A Passionate Life by Lyndall Gordon (Virago, London, 2008). On Anne’s hair, ‘Bad Hair Days for the Brontës’ was published on the BBC website on 24 April 2008, while the critic who was depressed by the controversy was William H. Pritchard, writing in The Hudson Review, Volume 49, Issue 2 (1996). Letters on the Improvement of the Mind by Hester Chapone (J. Exshaw, Dublin, 1773) is fascinating. ‘The Rescue: James La Trobe and Anne Brontë’ by Margaret Connor, in Brontë Society Transactions, Volume 24, Issue 1 (1999), gave useful context. Some works by critics who were less than enthusiastic about Anne are: The Key to the Brontë Works: The Key to Charlotte Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre and her other works, Showing the method of their construction and their relation to the facts and people of her life, by John Malham-Dembleby (Walter Scott Publishing, London, 1911); ‘At the Grave of Anne Brontë’ by Percy C. Standing in The English Illustrated Magazine (August 1897); The Essence of the Brontës by Muriel Spark (Carcanet, Manchester, 2014); and Margaret Oliphant, in Women Novelists of Queen Victoria’s Reign (Hurst & Blackett, London, 1897). Mary Ward’s preface to The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is in the Smith, Elder, London, 1898 edition of the novel. The Crimes of Charlotte Brontë by James Tully (Constable, London, 2013) is fascinating. The Brontë plays I read were Moor Born by Dan Totheroh (Samuel French, New York, 1934), The Brontës of Haworth Parsonage by John Davison (Frederick Muller Ltd, London, 1934), Wild Decembers by Clemence Dane (William Heineman, London, 1932), Branwell by Martyn Richards (Longmans, Dorset, 1948). Withering Looks by Lip Service Theatre is sadly not published but there is information about it at www.lipservicetheatre.co.uk/shows/withering-looks. I don’t recommend Devotion: the book of the film by Warwick Mannon (Hollywood Publications, 1946). My thoughts on Shirley were influenced by ‘Private and Social Themes in Shirley’ by Professor Asa Briggs, in Brontë Society Transactions, Volume 13, Issue 68 (1958). I found G. D. Hargreaves’s essays, ‘Incomplete Texts of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall’, in Brontë Society Transactions, Volume 16, Issue 2 (1972), ‘Further Omissions in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall’ in Brontë Society Transactions, Volume 17, Issue 2 (1977), and ‘Smith, Elder’s 1857–60 Edition of the Brontë Life and works’, in Brontë Society Transactions, Volume 29, Issue 1 (2004), crucial to understanding Anne’s publication history and the variant texts. Their Proper Sphere: a study of the Brontë sisters as early Victorian female novelists by Inga-Stina Ewbank (Edward Arnold, London, 1966) is heartening. A Book for Her by Bridget Christie (Century, London, 2015) tells the story of how she developed her show A Bic for Her.
In Chapter 6, on Agnes, I learned about Victorian governesses from Other People’s Daughters: The Life and Times of the Governess by Ruth Brandon (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, London, 2008) and The Victorian Governess by Kathryn Hughes (Hambledon Press, London, 1993). Journal of a Governess by Nelly Weeton, edited by Edward Hall (Oxford University Press, London, 1936–9) is searing. The Governess by Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington (London, 1839), is the opposite. I learned about Anne’s ghost in ‘Spooky tale of “haunted” staircase from Blake Hall in Mirfield with Brontë links – which has turned up in New York’ by Martin Shaw, Huddersfield Daily Examiner, 29 December 2014. ‘“Hapless Dependents”: Women and Animals in Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey’ by Maggie Berg, in Studies in the Novel, Volume 34, Number 2 (2002), was very useful, as was Save the Cat! The Last Book on Screenwriting That You’ll Ever Need by Blake Snyder (Michael Wiese Productions, Studio City, California, 2005).
In Chapter 7, on Branwell, I began with Daphne du Maurier’s wonderful The Infernal World of Branwell Brontë (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1972). For fictional treatments of Anne’s time at Thorp Green, Philippa Stone’s The Captive Dove (Robert Hale, London, 1968) is intriguing; Oscar W. Firkins’s play Empurpled Moors, in The Bride of Quietness and other plays (University of Minneapolis Press, 1933), is less so. There is good thinking about Huntingdon in ‘The Villain of Wildfell Hall: Aspects and Prospects of Arthur Huntingdon’ by Marianne Thormählen in Modern Language Review, Volume 88, Number 4 (1993), and ‘“Imbecile Laughter” and “Desperate Earnest” in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall’ by Juliet McMaster, in Modern Language Quarterly, Volume 43 (1982). Deborah Lutz’s The Dangerous Lover: Gothic Villains, Byronism and the Nineteenth-Century Seduction Narrative (Ohio State University Press, 2006) is also very good on the allure of bad men, as is The Female Romantics: Nineteenth-century Women Novelists and Byronism by Caroline Franklin (Routledge, London, 2013). I relied on Edna O’Brien’s Byron in Love (Orion, London, 2009) and Fiona MacCarthy’s Byron: Life and Legend (Faber & Faber, London, 2003) for the poet’s story. I found ‘Angel or Sister? Writing and Screening the Heroine of Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall’ by Aleks Sierz, in Sisterhoods: Across the Literature/Media Divide, edited by Deborah Cartmell, I. Q. Hunter, Heidi Kaye and Imelda Whelehan (Pluto, London, 1998), very useful in contextualising the miniseries. Charlotte Brontë by E. F. Benson (Longmans, London, 1932) was helpful on Anne’s treatment of Branwell. I’m indebted to ‘The Art of Comparison: Remarriage in Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall’ by Nicole A. Diederich, in Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature, Volume 57, Number 2 (2003), for insight into the risks Helen takes in marrying again, and for the comparison with John Stuart Mill. In worrying about Gilbert, and the narrative frame, I also found Rachel K. Carnell’s ‘Feminism and the Public Sphere in Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall’, in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Volume 53, Number 1 (1998), very useful, as well as Naomi Jacobs’s ‘Gender and Layered Narrative in Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall’, in The Journal of Narrative Technique, Volume 16, Number 3 (1986), Tess O’Toole’s ‘Siblings and Suitors in the Narrative Architecture of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall’, in Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, Volume 39, Number 4, (1999), and John Sutherland’s ‘Who is Helen Graham?’, in Is Heathcliff a Murderer? Puzzles in 19th Century Fiction (Oxford University Press, 1996). Penny Gay’s essay, ‘Anne Brontë and the forms of romantic comedy’, in Brontë Society Transactions, Volume 23, Issue 1 (1998), helped me defend Gilbert.
In Chapter 8, on Patrick, I enjoyed both A Man of Sorrows: The Life, Letters and Times of the Rev. Patrick Brontë 1777–1861 by John Lock and W. T. Dixon (Nelson, London, 1965) and Patrick Brontë: Father of Genius by Dudley Green (Nonsuch, Stroud, 2008). Terry Eagleton’s Myths of Power: A Marxist Study of the Brontës (Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1988) is illuminating on the Brontës, class and immigration. Doctor Who: The Child of Time by Jonathan Morris and others (Panini UK, Tunbridge Wells, 2012) is surreal. Jill L. Matus’s Unstable Bodies: Victorian Representations of Sexuality and Maternity (Manchester University Press, 1995) was very interesting on reviews of Agnes Grey. The Report on a Preliminary Inquiry into the Sewerage, Drainage, and Supply of Water, and the Sanitary Conditions of the Inhabitants of the Hamlet of Haworth by Benjamin Herschel Babbage (General Board of Health, London, 1850) is not for the faint-hearted. Nor is A Corpse at the Haworth Tandoori by Robert Barnard (HarperCollins, London, 1998).
In Chapter 9, on Helen, Antonia Losano’s excellent essay, ‘The Professionalization of the Woman Artist in Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall’, in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Volume 58, Number 1 (2003), helped me think through Helen’s journey, as did ‘Art and the artist as heroine in the novels of Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë’ by Jane Sellars, in Brontë Society Transactions, Volume 20, Issue 2 (1990), and ‘The Artist in her Studio: The Influence of the Brontës on Women Artists’ by Jane Sellars, in Brontë Studies, Volume 30, Issue 3 (2005). For a different view, try The Madwoman in the Attic by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar (Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2000). Old Mistresses by Roszika Parker and Griselda Pollock (Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1981) is very good on the need for a new word to describe women artists. I don’t entirely recommend Olive by Dinah Craik (Macmillan, London, 1893) or Pillars of the House by Charlotte Yonge (Macmillan, London, 1888). Carolyn Heilbrun’s insight about pseudonyms comes from her groundbreaking Writing a Woman’s Life (Norton, New York, 1988). Meghan Bullock’s essay, ‘Abuse, silence and solitude in Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall’, in Brontë Studies, Volume 29, Issue 2 (2004), helped me think through the silence of the abused women in Anne’s novel. For a survey of the way gossip works in the novel, ‘Gossip, Diary, Letter, Text: Anne Brontë’s Narrative Tenant and the Problematic of the Gothic Sequel’ by Jan B. Gordon, in ELH, Volume 51, Number 4 (1984), is excellent.
In Chapter 10, on Anne, I reread Anne of the Island by L. M. Montgomery (Puffin, Harmondsworth, 1983). I learned about Gérin from Helen MacEwan’s Winifred Gérin: Biographer of the Brontës (Sussex Academic Press, London, 2016).
At the crisis of Anne Brontë’s second and last novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, her heroine Helen finally decides to leave Arthur Huntingdon, her drunk abusive husband. She’s put up with a lot. But now he’s trying to ruin their son, teaching him to swear and be horrid to his mother and pouring booze down his throat; he is four. It’s supposed to ‘make a man of him’.
When Helen flees her marriage, she has to make a woman of herself. She moves into Wildfell Hall, which is half in ruins, like her life. She swaps her hateful married surname for her mother’s maiden name, and the ostentatious clothes her husband liked in favour of the ‘plain, dark, sober’ clothes she likes. This is useful, too, because in these dark clothes she can disguise herself as a widow. She is killing off her husband in her mind. She is remembering who she was before she married him. Knowing this day would come, she’s secretly taught herself to paint. She finds a dealer in London, adopts another pseudonym and starts turning out commercial landscapes. She works out how to evade the village’s prying gossips. She learns not to let anyone get too close, not even her brother, Frederick Lawrence, who has helped her find this place of safety, and especially not the handsome young gentleman farmer, Gilbert Markham, who keeps popping round. Helen becomes self-sufficient. She won’t owe anyone anything, not again. She won’t be vulnerable, not again. She learns how to mother her son, Arthur, teaching him that being a man is not about liquor and swearing, but about intelligence and kindness. And when Gilbert’s mother Mrs Markham criticises her mothering, she lets rip. Why should girls be brought up like hothouse flowers, while boys are encouraged to go out in the world to get ‘experience’? Experience only means boys are encouraged to be bad, and when men are bad, women get hurt. This line of argument doesn’t win Helen any friends. But she doesn’t care. She works hard, and gains independence (financial, emotional, creative). Most courageously of all, when Huntingdon gets ill, she risks everything to go and nurse him, to be with him when he dies. And when she decides she might like to marry again, she chooses Gilbert, who is worthy of her love – and this time, she proposes to him.
Helen has made a woman of herself.
Back home in London, working my way through a tottering stack of Brontë biographies, I become convinced Anne knew how to write about Helen making a woman of herself because she did it too, transforming herself from the baby of the family, a delicate, gentle girl who grew up full of fear, never thinking she’d amount to anything, into a talented teacher, a bold thinker and an extraordinary writer.
In the past fortnight I’ve read every word Anne left behind. I had hoped it would take longer, but Anne really hasn’t left many traces. I’m a bit stunned by how much of what she said has been lost. Only five of her letters survive, though she wrote many more. This is bad. Trying to work out just how bad, I open a biography of Virginia Woolf and find that she left nearly four thousand letters. Even Charlotte left around 950. All the prose Anne wrote as a child is gone. Many of her poems are missing too, as well as, possibly, the start of a third novel. If she wrote a diary, it no longer exists. But she and Emily wrote a ‘diary paper’ every four years, a brief update on their lives which they would fold up and squirrel away in a tin box like a time capsule, to look at when it was time to write the next. If they were together, they wrote them jointly; if apart, they wrote one each. Two of Anne’s are left, and two of the joint ones. Four pieces of paper. Compared with Woolf’s fat volumes of diaries, it’s not much. Even Sylvia Plath’s journals make up an impressively chunky book, and she only lived a year longer than Anne did, and some of her journals were destroyed. Of course there are also letters about Anne, and reminiscences of her; there are some of her books with her revealing marginalia; there are her things, which are surprisingly eloquent; and there are heaps and heaps of scholarship about her family. Yet Juliet Barker writes that the known facts of Anne’s and Emily’s lives ‘could be written on a single sheet of paper; their letters, diary papers and drawings would not fill two dozen’. It’s very discouraging. How can so little be known about a member of one of the most famous families in history? The library shelves are groaning with books about the Brontës. Some biographers daringly follow their own hunches (sometimes into wild and dubious conjectures), while the so-called ‘laundry list’ biographers scrutinise all the tiny, daily details (sometimes missing the big picture). And no one agrees on anything. Even the colour of Anne’s hair!
All the biographers rely heavily on a few contemporary sources, so I go back to those. Charlotte’s school friends, Ellen Nussey and Mary Taylor, actually knew Anne. But they both seem to have axes to grind. And they don’t agree either. The first biography was written by Elizabeth Gaskell who was friends with Charlotte, but they only met after Anne had died. Anne’s father outlived her, but he wasn’t chatty. Nor was Arthur Bell Nicholls, the curate who became Charlotte’s husband. Maybe this is reassuring. Would I want people poking about in my stuff 170-odd years after I died? Absolutely not. By most (but not all) accounts Anne was a private person. So maybe I should be pleased for her. But I’m not. I’m frustrated. Because I’m nosy and because I feel quite ardently about her, and I wish she would stop slipping out of view.
I’m on safer ground with Anne’s work. When I reread her two novels, the blistering preface she wrote explaining The Tenant of Wildfell Hall to its hostile critics, and her fifty-nine poems, Anne speaks out loud and clear. It can be dangerous to assume anything about a writer from her work, but Anne did write autobiographically. Charlotte said Agnes Grey was ‘the mirror of the mind of the writer’, while The Tenant of Wildfell Hall was an attempt ‘to reproduce every detail (of course, with fictitious characters, incidents, and situations)’ of what happened to their brother.
A lot of stories have been told about Anne, and the more I learn about her, the more I dislike the way she was forced into particular roles, both in her life and in her afterlife. Her work has such clarity, such vigour, that it feels like an act of resistance, a way of pushing back against being turned into a character in someone else’s story, especially a minor character who doesn’t have many lines and makes an early exit. I want to try to see Anne through the stories she told, not the stories told about her. Anne’s fiction reveals a lot about how she saw the world. Sometimes she wrote to fulfil wishes. Sometimes she tried out lives she might want to live. Sometimes she turned difficult experiences to good use. Sometimes she defied fate. One afternoon in the library, with dusty books stacked around me like a fort, I realise what upsets me most about Charlotte saying Anne was always preparing for early death is that it dooms her, it traps her in one story, and not a good one. Can her story be told another way?
I decide to look at Anne through the women and men who shaped her, and the women she shaped, on the pages of her books, to try to find out how she made a woman of herself, how she ripped up the story she was supposed to live and became the artist of her own life.
Anne never knew one of the women who shaped her most: her mother, Maria Brontë, née Branwell, died when she was just twenty months old. Twenty months is very young to remember anything, but a life-changing event can sometimes stick. My seventies childhood is a haze of brown and orange, but I remember my brother being born, when I was twenty-one months old. When I imagine what it might have been like if my first big event was a death, not a birth, I start to get a sense of the weight of Anne’s loss, its unbearable heft. Every Sunday, in church, Anne saw her mother’s memorial stone, with its stark, ominous line from Matthew – ‘Be ye also ready: for in such an hour as ye think not the Son of Man cometh’ – warning that death could come for her at any moment. Anne was the baby, the one who needed a mother most. Did she already suffer from asthma? She certainly had it later on in life, but no one knows when it began. If she was a child who sometimes found it hard to breathe, she might have seemed, as Charlotte later said, ‘delicate all her life’, and maybe that’s one of the reasons Charlotte thought it couldn’t be long before Anne stopped breathing altogether.
I look at pictures of Anne next to pictures of Maria and I’m struck by how alike they look. They both have the same cherubic faces, the same curls, the same rosebud mouths. When Anne was very young, Charlotte said she saw an angel at Anne’s cradle, and from then on, Anne’s role in the family was fixed; she was sweet, lost and ethereal, halfway to being an angel herself.
Anne’s mother also comes over as a saint in the early biographies. In the very first, published in 1857, The Life of Charlotte Brontë by Elizabeth Gaskell, Maria is a ‘little, gentle creature’ who was ‘gentle, delicate’, full of ‘tender grace’, ‘feminine modesty’ and ‘deep piety’ and ‘always dressed with a quiet simplicity of taste, which accorded well with her general character’. Gaskell had an agenda. She wanted to tell the critics who called Charlotte’s books coarse and unwomanly that they were wrong, that Charlotte wasn’t a bad woman but a martyr whose life was so tough that she couldn’t help it if some of it ended up on the page. Gaskell started by giving Charlotte a suitably angelic mother.
It’s only one of the ways Gaskell skewed the story. Now I see why everyone who writes about the Brontës has to grapple with her Life: it didn’t just come first, it’s also fantastic. I speed through it like a novel. Which it more or less is, because Gaskell never lets facts get in the way of a good story. When a visitor asked Patrick, the Brontës’ father, how much was true, he said, ‘Mrs Gaskell is a novelist, you know, and we must allow her a little romance, eh?’ The publishers of the mighty Shakespeare Head edition of the Brontës’ works agreed; in 1859 they reprinted it alongside the novels, as though it was fiction too.
The Life reveals as much about Gaskell as it does about Charlotte. Because although Gaskell looked like a domestic goddess (she was a minister’s wife, a mother of four and an active philanthropist, always rolling up her sleeves to help someone in need), she wrote out of a welter of grief and guilt. She turned to fiction after her baby son died of scarlet fever and she ‘took refuge in invention to exclude the memory of painful scenes’. She wasn’t just grieving her son, but her other losses, starting with her mother, who died when she was a baby, and the six brothers and sisters who died before she was born. Gaskell always knew life was fragile. Her aunt brought her up in Knutsford (basically Cranford) and it was all very loving and cosy and chocolate-boxy (except when her aunt had to deal with her violent husband, and when Gaskell had to make painful visits to her father and his new family). She had a good education, and married a good man. But her brother drifted. Without money or support, he found his options so viciously limited that all he could do was risk his life at sea. He never returned. Just vanished, off the coast of India. No one knows if he drowned, had an accident, killed himself or just decided to disappear. Gaskell’s novels are full of dead mothers, dead children and thwarted men, so for her, Charlotte’s story was catnip.
But as I learn more about the real Maria Brontë, she seems gutsier, more interesting and much less sweet than Gaskell makes out.
She was born Maria Branwell, in sunny, fun Penzance, into a big family. They were comfortable and well off; her father was a grocer and tea merchant, and one of her brothers became town mayor. Pale, petite and clever, Maria wasn’t in any hurry to marry. Her parents died when she was in her twenties, and she and two sisters stayed on in the family home until their uncle, who owned the house, died, and they had to find somewhere else to live. Maybe Maria wanted to shake up her life, because instead of appealing to any of her ten siblings, she bravely travelled four hundred miles, from balmy Cornwall to cold, rugged Yorkshire, to help run her aunt and uncle’s school. Her pluck was rewarded; she met Patrick Brontë, a young, ambitious, Cambridge-educated clergyman, tall and handsome, with a husky Irish accent. He wooed her strenuously. Who wouldn’t be impressed by a man who walked ten miles to take you out for a walk, then walked ten miles back? Whether Maria liked Patrick’s moral stamina, or his leg muscles, when he proposed, in the romantic ivy-covered ruins of medieval Kirkstall Abbey, she said yes. She was twenty-nine.
Gaskell compares Maria’s love letters to Juliet’s speeches to Romeo, but Maria wasn’t an innocent, smitten teenager; she was an independent woman who knew her own mind and she warned her fiancé, ‘For some years I have been perfectly my own mistress, subject to no control whatever.’ She prepared for marriage by reading a book called Advice to a Lady, by making a wedding cake, by flirtatiously threatening ‘My Dear Saucy Pat’ with ‘a real downright scolding’ and by declaring her love as candidly as her daughters’ heroines ever did:
you possess all my heart. Two months ago I could not possibly have believed that you would ever engross so much of my thoughts and affections, and far less could I have thought that I should be so forward as to tell you so.
Maria knew love was a leap of faith and she was ready to jump:
I am certain no one ever loved you with an affection more pure, constant, tender, and ardent than that which I feel. Surely this is not saying too much; it is the truth, and I trust you are worthy to know it.
He was. They married on 29 December 1812, and they were happy. When she turned thirty, Patrick wrote her a tender birthday poem, opening with the alluring invitation, ‘Maria, let us walk, and breathe, the morning air’, where birds sing and ‘The primrose pale, / Perfumes the gale.’ They had a girl, Maria, in 1813, and a year later, another girl, Elizabeth, named after Maria’s older sister. That year, they moved to Thornton, a lively town in West Yorkshire.
Their little house is still there; it’s now an Italian cafe called Emily’s. I visit it one cold bright day. Sun streams through the windows, into the drawing room where, by the fireplace, Maria gave birth to four more children in four years – Charlotte in 1816, Branwell in 1817, Emily in 1818 and finally Anne on 17 January 1820. I check with the waiters. Is this hearth The One? It is. I sink into a squishy sofa, exactly where Anne was born. Over the years, the house has been a butcher’s shop and a restaurant. It was lovingly restored by the crime novelist Barbara Whitehead, then sold again, rented out, flooded, renovated again, and through all this, the fireplace survived. As I drink my cappuccino, and eat my tiny, perfect cannoli, sweet with ricotta and vanilla, it feels wonderful that the house is alive, a family home (the couple who own it live upstairs), full of books and chatter. I imagine Maria sitting where I am sitting, her baby in her arms, when Patrick told her he’d got a new job. It came with a bigger house, and Haworth was only six miles away, so they could still see their friends. In April 1820, they set off in a convoy of horse-drawn carts. Patrick walked, sometimes lifting one of the children out for fresh air, and Maria held three-month-old Anne in her lap.
But they’d barely got settled into the Parsonage at Haworth when Maria collapsed with a pain in her stomach. It was cancer of the uterus, probably made worse by all the pregnancies. She was ill for seven and a half horrific months during which, Patrick said, ‘Death pursued her unrelentingly’. In her love letters, she’d worried that ‘My heart is more ready to attach itself to earth than heaven’. Nine years of marriage and six children hadn’t made her a more quiescent clergyman’s wife, and she refused to slip serenely away. She questioned her fate and her faith, and it hurt Patrick to admit that ‘the great enemy … often disturbed her mind in the last conflict’, and when she died it was ‘not triumphantly’. Of course it wasn’t. She was only thirty-eight, and she was terrified of what would become of her family; her anguished last words were, ‘Oh God, my poor children!’
I wonder if Anne heard her say it. She was at her mother’s deathbed after months of being told to creep around the Parsonage and play quietly, starved of attention as her mother lay dying and Patrick nursed her, when he wasn’t working at his demanding new job. Anne wrote about her early childhood when she was twenty-seven, in a long, intense autobiographical poem called ‘Self-Communion’, composed over five months of unflinching reflection. I go to the British Library to have a look at the manuscript. I have to request it in advance, I have to be vouched for, and once I have it in my hot little hands, I have to sit at a desk where I can be watched while I read it. None of this prevents me becoming enchanted. It wasn’t published in Anne’s lifetime; in fact it wasn’t published at all until 1900, in a limited edition of just thirty copies. Which seems appropriate, as it is so raw and exposed, a distillation of Anne’s life rather than a straightforward story. Anne remembers being ‘a helpless child’, ‘feeble’, frightened, gullible, timid and frantic for ‘protecting love’, which is her ‘only refuge from despair’. Her earliest memories must have been of her father poleaxed by grief; of her oldest sister, seven-year-old Maria, bravely trying to stand in for their mother; of her aunt Elizabeth coming to help but hoping to get back to Penzance as soon as she could. In ‘Self-Communion’, Anne describes wanting to be loved and wanting to love, overwhelmed by a ‘love so earnest, strong, and deep / It could not be expressed’. She pictures herself, as a toddler, as a ‘Poor helpless thing!’ whose loss has left her utterly disorientated: ‘Where shall it centre so much trust …?’ Like ivy that ‘clasps the forest tree’, she wonders, ‘How can it stand alone?’