Brontës (151 page)

The stress also told on Patrick, not least because he must have been aware that his daughter's illness was a manifestation of an unhappiness for which he was personally responsible. The very thing happened that Charlotte had feared most and which had persuaded her to reject Mr NichoUs in such uncompromising terms. Her father had a second stroke which, for a time, brought on complete blindness: he could not even distinguish between night and day. Though Charlotte was filled with alarm and feared the worst, he gradually recovered some vision but his sight was never fully restored to its former state. ‘I think him very patient with the apprehension of what, to him would be the greatest of privations, hanging over his head', Charlotte told George Smith a month later, ‘I can but earnestly hope that what remains of sight may be spared him to the end.'
⁴⁴
Out of this evil some good was to come. More than ever dependent on his daughter and his curate for the smooth running of the parish and its many institutions, Patrick was to become increasingly aware of what he had lost in the efficient and hard-working Mr NichoUs.

The sudden deterioration in his sight obliged Patrick to abandon a somewhat startling half-formed project of his to go to London for a few days in the summer.
⁴⁵
As Patrick's last expedition from home had been when he escorted his daughters to Brussels in 1842, and he had, since then, turned down invitations from local men as eminent as Richard Monckton Milnes on the grounds that he did not go from home, the scale of the plan is astonishing. It can only have been conceived as an attempt on Patrick's part to divert Charlotte's attention from Mr NichoUs' sorrows and give her pleasure. That he was prepared at the age of seventy-six to undergo the long and difficult railway journeys which would have been involved, not to mention the turmoil and disruption to his quiet home life which a visit to London would entail, is a measure of his love for his daughter and his anxiety to ‘make it up' to her.

Though she had dutifully submitted to her father's wishes, Charlotte had left Patrick in no doubt as to her own view: that he had been unjust and unnecessarily cruel to NichoUs. If she had been left to decide for herself, however, it is not easy to perceive what line she would have taken. One can only guess that she would perhaps have allowed Nicholls to court her so that she could have got to know him better and then taken a more informed decision. The strong suspicion remains, however, that had her father not so
overreacted to the proposal and driven Mr NichoUs to such uncharacteristic displays of emotion, she would never have looked further than the ‘statuelike' exterior and seen the heart of the man.

As it was, Charlotte's sense of injustice and pity had made her suddenly far more favourable to Mr NichoUs than she would otherwise have been. His departure brought home to her once again the solitude of her existence and Patrick's seizure, following so close on its heels, was yet another reminder of his mortality and the horror of an existence as the last survivor of a closely knit family which his death would bring her.

Miserable and unwell, Charlotte brooded on her wrongs and became touchy and sensitive even with well-meaning friends. A letter from George Smith, who was himself ill and overwrought with work, prompted a sympathetic response with a sting in its tail.

What you now feel is always I believe felt at some time of life or other by those [who] have much to do or suffer – whose lot it is to bear heavy responsibilities, or undergo severe anxieties, and in whose moral constitution there is that degree of elaborateness which will result in sensitive feeling.

Notwithstanding your aged sensations – you are far too young to despair for a moment. You will be better: I know you will be better, but in care, in mental rest and moderate physical exercise lie the means of cure. Let no influence, let no exigency, if possible, impose on you the spur or the goad: I am sure you do not need these, nor ever did in your life; not even when you turn with distaste from the task of answering a friendly letter; and let me just say, though I say it not without pain, a correspondence which has not interest enough in itself to sustain life –
ought
to die.
⁴⁶

In her present bitter and unhappy state, Charlotte had once again persuaded herself that her publisher's friendliness was purely business-motivated; though his letters were a lifeline to her, she could not believe that he considered the correspondence anything other than a troublesome necessity to keep his author sweet. There was a certain misanthropic sense of the fitness of things and a savage pleasure in her suggestion that it should end.

Charlotte's sense of isolation and deprivation had grown overwhelming in the wake of Arthur NichoUs' departure. She temporarily lost all sense of proportion and, for the first time – and without consulting Smith, Elder & Co. – answered one of her critics in the press. The
Christian Remembrancer
had carried an anonymous review of
Villette
by Anne Mozley, sister of the
editor, in April. As an organ of the Church of England, it carried considerable weight with Charlotte's closest friends, Ellen Nussey and Miss Wooler, and with her domestic circle. Though she had ignored its partisan attacks on her before, in the three months since the publication of this review she had allowed one particular passage to fester in her mind. Still protesting against the ‘outrages on decorum, the moral perversity, the toleration of, nay, indifference to vice which deform her first powerful picture of a desolate woman's trials and sufferings' in
Jane Eyre
, the reviewer concluded that the intervening years had brought the author

a little happiness and success, for in many important moral points
Villette
is an improvement on its predecessors. The author has gained both in amiability and propriety since she first presented herself to the world, – soured, coarse, and grumbling; an alien, it might seem, from society, and amenable to none of its laws.
⁴⁷

Apart from the hurtful but excusable ignorance of the devastation which the intervening years had actually wrought on Charlotte, it was the last sentence which particularly stuck in her throat. To her it seemed like a repetition of that insidious suggestion in the
Quarterly Review
notice of
Jane Eyre
that ‘Currer Bell', if a woman, had ‘for some sufficient reason, long forfeited the society of her own sex'.
⁴⁸
That insult, published when Charlotte's true identity was not yet known, had provoked her to a bitingly sarcastic response which Smith, Elder & Co. had wisely declined to publish. Now, her veil of anonymity cast aside and her sense of isolation hard upon her, she read into the
Christian Remembrancer
review an insinuation that there was ‘some disadvantageous occult motive for a retired life'. Once again, she took up her pen in her own name to defend herself, this time offering ‘a few words of temperate explanation'.

Providence so regulated my destiny that I was born and have been reared in the seclusion of a country parsonage. I have never been rich enough to go out into the world as a participator in its gaieties, though it early became my duty to leave home in order partly to diminish the many calls on a limited income. That income is lightened of claims in another sense now, for of a family of six I am the only survivor.

My father is now in his seventy-seventh year; his mind is clear as it ever was, and he is not infirm, but he suffers from partial privation and threatened loss of
sight; as his general health is also delicate, he cannot be left often or long: my place consequently is at home.
⁴⁹

The October issue of the periodical carried a notice from the editor acknowledging Charlotte's letter ‘which claims at once our respect and sympathy'. ‘We wrote in entire ignorance of the author's private history, and with no wish to pry into it', he hastened to assure her, adding, ‘We now learn with pleasure, but not with surprise, that the main motive for this seclusion is devotion to the purest and most sacred of domestic ties.'
⁵⁰

In the past Charlotte had liked to use the excuse of those ‘domestic ties' to avoid uncongenial employment or visiting, and Patrick had neither interfered with nor attempted to command her. Now, however, when for once he had laid down the law and stuck rigidly to it, her ‘domestic ties' had become bonds against which she chafed. She tried to find relief in her writing but ‘Willie Ellin' did not progress as it should. It seems to have been a reworking of those elements of
The Professor
left out of
Villette
. Again, it concerned two strikingly contrasted brothers: Edward Ellin, a grossly abusive and violent manufacturer, given to horsewhipping his brother, who is recognizably the same as his prototype in the earlier novel, Edward Crimsworth; and William Ellin, the gentle and gentlemanly younger son, impoverished and reluctantly dependent on his loathed half-brother. Though the characters – even to their Christian names – had been lifted straight from
The Professor
and could therefore claim an ancestry all the way back to Branwell's juvenile story, ‘The Wool is Rising', Charlotte added poignancy by making the victimized younger brother a ten-year-old child.
⁵¹
Though she continued with the story in June, she seems to have abandoned it the following month, perhaps feeling that she was simply retreading already well-worn ground or, more likely, fearing that the critics would not take kindly to Edward Ellin, another ‘vulgar' and ‘profane' creation from the pen of ‘Currer Bell'.

Without the solace of writing, Charlotte was driven to her usual expedient when miserable – temporary flight from home. Having fulfilled her duties at home by entertaining the Reverend W.R. Smith, William Morgan's replacement at Christ Church in Bradford, who came to give the annual Sunday school sermons at the end of July, and the Reverend William Busfeild, vicar of Keighley, who preached for the Oddfellows the following day,
⁵²
she felt free to leave.

It is an indication of the impression her previous visit to Scotland had
left on her memory that she chose to go there again in the uncongenial company of Joe Taylor and his family, rather than visit Ellen at Brookroyd or Miss Wooler who had taken a house at Hornsea for the summer. Ellen may have paid a brief visit to Haworth on her return from Oundle
⁵³
but the friends were rapidly falling out over the question of Mr Nicholls. Ellen entirely disapproved not only of Mr Nicholls himself but also, and more especially, of Charlotte's increasingly obvious change in attitude towards him.

After allowing six miserable letters from her suitor to go unanswered, Charlotte had finally relented and allowed herself to be drawn into a clandestine correspondence. She may even have had a secret visit from Mr Nicholls.
⁵⁴
Ellen heartily disapproved of such behaviour and wrote to Mary Taylor, expecting her support in the battle to keep Charlotte out of Mr Nicholls' clutches. Instead, she received a round condemnation herself.

You talk wonderful nonsense abt C Brontë in yr letter. What do you mean about ‘bearing her position so long, & enduring to the end'? & still better – ‘bearing our lot whatever it is'. If its C's lot to be married shd n't she bear that too? or does your strange morality mean that she shd refuse to ameliorate her lot when it lies in her power. How wd she be inconsistent with herself in marrying? Because she considers her own pleasure? If this is so new for her to do, it is high time she began to make it more common. It is an outrageous exaction to expect her to give up her choice in a matter so important, & I think her to blame in having been hitherto so yielding that her friends can think of making such an impudent demand.
⁵⁵

Ellen's attitude was particularly offensive to Charlotte in that it was so two-faced. Only a few months before, she had been in high hopes that she would secure a husband for herself in Mary Gorham's brother. Now, when Charlotte had the possibility of marrying, she turned all sniffily moralistic and insisted on the duty of spinsterhood. There is no doubt that jealousy and fear were responsible. Since the deaths of Emily and Anne, Ellen had (she thought) made herself indispensable to Charlotte as her friend, her surrogate sister and her confidante. Ellen took immense pride and satisfaction in this role, more especially, it has to be said, since Charlotte had become famous as ‘Currer Bell'. After Charlotte's death, it was to become her
raison d'étre
. A husband threatened all that. Charlotte would naturally confide in him and, however important her friendship
with Ellen remained, it could never be as intimate as it was before her husband came between them.

Exactly when the disagreement between Charlotte and Ellen became an open quarrel is not clear, but it is surely significant that there are no extant letters from Charlotte between 23 June 1853 and 1 March 1854.
⁵⁶
Ellen may, of course, have destroyed some which, as the quarrel grew more bitter, put her in a bad light or contained harsh words from Charlotte. Certainly, at some point, they not only stopped visiting each other but also stopped writing, maintaining a frigid silence that spoke more of the breakdown in their friendship than any volume of words could have done. In December Miss Wooler tried to intervene but in vain: ‘Do not think that your kind wish respecting E. Nussey and myself does not touch or influence me; it does both;' Charlotte responded, ‘yet I hardly know how to take the step you recommend'.
⁵⁷
Towards the end of February 1854, when Patrick had finally been persuaded to sanction Mr Nicholls' letters and visits and events were moving towards their inevitable conclusion, Charlotte found the necessary nerve and forgiveness to put an end to the quarrel. Ellen had been ill and this provided an excuse for a reconciliation. Ellen grasped the olive branch willingly: a friendship diminished in intimacy by the intervention of a husband was better than no friendship at all. She could not resist pouring out her woes to Mary Gorham, now Mrs Hewitt, and how one-sided that account was is evident from Mary's response.