Romancing Miss Bronte (6 page)

Eventually, Constantin Heger’s letters ceased altogether.

C
harlotte had always known that her temperament was ill-suited to teaching; she loved the subject matter but had no patience for the riotous little subjects themselves. Many years ago, when Branwell was nineteen and Charlotte not yet twenty-one, she had come home at Christmas from her first months of teaching at Roe Head School and confided her despair to her brother. The two of them, bemoaning the drudge life of tutors and governesses, had concluded that there was only one way to escape such a fate: they would publish.

Since childhood all four siblings had been scribbling stories and poetry, interweaving characters, events, and ongoing narratives that resulted in shared imaginary worlds of extraordinary detail. These imaginary kingdoms, long ago christened Angria and Gondal and teeming with political intrigue, adventure, and high drama, held infinitely more appeal than the dull routine of life in bleak Haworth. Like all children, they had discovered that this realm of consciousness was one over which they had absolute control, and therein lay the secret to their happiness. By drawing back the veils and slipping into Glass Town, they were able to free themselves from outside circumstances—their poverty, their isolation, and, for the girls, their plainness—all those things that had bred insecurity, shyness, and debilitating self-consciousness.

Writing could be a path to exquisite joy. It offered a way to live contentedly in an infinitely dreary world that offered little hope for change. They would always be odd; they would always be poor. And so they held on to their kingdoms long after the age when childish fantasies are put
aside. Ambition never entered into the game. Not for the women. Well, perhaps a little for Charlotte. But only because Branwell yearned for fame, and she followed adoringly in his steps.

So, that Christmas it was resolved: Charlotte and Branwell would turn their writing to profit—and why not? How often had they lamented the quality of the literary material coming out of London’s print shops? Young, full of grand illusions, they believed in the originality of their work; but above all they clung firmly to the Romantic’s notion of the imaginary world as an exalted realm, and the poet as a divinelike creature.

Over the holidays they launched a letter-writing campaign, seeking opinions on their stories and poems and advice on how to get their work into print. Charlotte sent several of her best efforts to England’s poet laureate, Robert Southey, along with a rather flighty, florid letter introducing herself as an aspiring poetess.

The reply, two months coming, was crushing—although Charlotte took some satisfaction in the fact that the illustrious poet deemed her worthy of a reply; Branwell’s queries (undoubtedly off-putting in his overestimation of his own talent) had bagged not a single response.

“You live in a visionary world,” Southey wrote,

Ah, there it was. She should have known better. Shame on her. Charlotte immediately replied:

Throughout the years that followed Charlotte continued to ride the fence between ambition and self-denial, and it was a balancing act fraught with constant tension. She was no rebel. She, too, subscribed to the powerful convention that it was not becoming for a lady (certainly not a Christian lady) to seek glory or recognition; but she was equally convinced of her own intelligence and of her elevated position in the clan as Branwell’s equal. There might have been a happy compromise if Branwell had succeeded. Ambition might have been appeased vicariously if only her brother had lived up to his side of the bargain. But he did not.

During the final months of that turbulent summer following Branwell’s dismissal, she watched the once powerful men around her gradually fail, their authority eroded by blindness and drunkenness. Certainly she mourned (even resented) their failure, but out of loss rose a new possibility. A new role for herself.

Surely there was justification for ambition when all the men in your life let you down.

“Emmy,” Charlotte began, looking up from the tea towel she was hemming, “do read something of your poetry to us this evening, dearest. That would cheer me out of my doldrums, I think.”

Emily lay on her stomach on the hearthrug, feet in the air and chin in her hands, reading a book by candlelight. Keeper lay sprawled at her side. She resisted for a moment, then turned a suspicious look on Charlotte.

“My poetry is not what you would judge cheerful.”

Charlotte hesitated before replying. “No, but it always fascinated me. It’s been years since we’ve read any of our verse to one another. I’ve quite lost track of your Gondal characters—Henry, Juliet Augusteena, Catherine Navarre. I daresay they must have changed.”

“No, not changed,” Emily replied. “New adventures and new intrigues, but they’re quite the same.” She turned back to her book.

They listened for a moment to the wind’s haunting sighs and moans.

Anne rose from the sofa to fold the bedsheet she’d been mending. “There. That’s finished. Another hole patched.”

Charlotte put down her sewing. “Here. Let me help.”

She rose, stepped over the sleeping spaniel, and took one end of the sheet from Anne.

“Emily, have you ever considered publishing your poetry?” Charlotte asked.

“What did you say?” she replied, rolling onto her side. Keeper—distressed by the tone of her voice—lifted his head and followed her warily with his eyes.

“Publishing your verse. You might consider it.” Charlotte’s voice softened. “It’s really quite exceptional.”

Emily twisted herself around and sat up. “You’ve been reading my poetry?” she accused sharply.

“It was quite unintentional. I came across your notebook while I was changing the sheets on your bed.”

“And you opened it and read it?”

“Yes, I did, dearest,” she said soothingly. “It was wrong of me, but I was curious. We used to share so much—we don’t anymore.”

Emily closed her book and rose swiftly to her feet, spooking both dogs, who scrambled out of her way. Towering over Charlotte, she said, “My notebooks are private. You have no right. What did you do with it?”

“I put it back of course. Now, would you listen to what I have to say?” She reached for Emily’s hand, but Emily pulled away.

“What? You want to publish my poetry for the sake of a few miserable shillings? To be ridiculed and mocked by fools?”

“Emily, dearest, I’m trying to tell you that what you’ve written is of considerable merit … and should you be interested in publishing—”

“You know perfectly well I don’t give a tinker’s damn for your ambitious schemes. You wanted us to go to Brussels, I went to Brussels. You wanted a school, I agreed to a school. If you want to publish poetry, then publish your own. But I would sooner walk stark naked through Haworth than lay Gondal before the world.”

She stormed out of the room.

Charlotte had gone white and stood trembling in the wake of her sister’s wrath.

“Oh goodness,” she said to Anne. “It’s going to be quite unpleasant around here for a few days.”

Anne motioned to the sofa. “Come sit back down. It’s all right. She’ll get over it.”

Charlotte’s hands were trembling as she picked up her needle.

Anne asked, “Do you really think it merits publication?”

“She hasn’t shared it with you?”

“No. Not in years.”

“It was completely unlike anything I’ve ever read—certainly it’s nothing like the sort of feeble, soppy poetry women generally write. Really, it was quite extraordinary, and powerful.”

Anne thought quietly for a moment and then said, “You should trust your judgment, Tally.”

“But she’s so frightfully stubborn. She always opposes me. Even when I have her best interests at heart.”

“You know how to win her over. You’ll think of a way.”

That night before she went to bed, Charlotte knocked on Emily’s door. Her room stood at the top of the stairs above the entry hall; it was tiny—barely large enough for a small bed, a dresser, and a chair. It had once been their playroom and, later, Branwell’s room. Then he went away and Emily made it undisputedly her own.

Charlotte opened the door a crack.

“May I come in?”

There was no answer. Charlotte opened the door wider.

Keeper, who was curled on the rug next to Emily’s bed, let out a low rumbling growl.

“It’s only me, boy. It’s okay.”

Charlotte stepped in and stood in the darkness. “Are you asleep?”

There was a rustle of sheets but no reply.

Moonlight fell into the room along the edges of the shutters. Charlotte could see her form curled in the narrow bed just beneath the window.

“Emmy, when I found your journal, I glanced at it just out of curiosity. I had no intention of prying. But after the first few lines, I couldn’t put it down.”

Charlotte groped her way to the chair; she gathered up the jumble of petticoats and shawls and sat down, piling it all on her lap.

“Your feelings are peculiar, Emily. Peculiar in a rare, beautiful way that very few people see—because you don’t want to be seen,” she said. “And your poetry is very much like you. I read the verses aloud to myself and I fancied I could hear a sort of wild melancholy and musicality. It was your love of nature and music, all of it wrapped in this clear, condensed, and very powerful language.”

She paused. She heard Emily rustle in the darkness. Listening.

“What is so unique and special about you comes forth with such genuineness, and such vigor, I should like all the world to read it, because then they would see my sister for who and what she truly is. There is nothing there to incite ridicule, Emmy, only the very highest praise.”

There was a long silence, broken only by the sound of the keening autumn wind.

Emily replied dryly, “Go away.”

With that, she buried her head in her pillow and pulled the covers around her ears.

Charlotte sat in the darkness, gathering her thoughts. “When we were children we dreamed of being authors, and if we have done anything with our lives so far, it is this: we write. If our other dreams fail, our dreams of school and travel, it’s of no importance. If none of us ever marries, it will be no great disappointment to any of us. But I should not like to regret that we once had a chance at this, and we let it slip by.”

After a long silence, when there was no response, Charlotte whispered, “Well, good night then.”

Anne had already changed in to her nightgown when Charlotte came to their room.

“Did she agree to it?”

“No.”

When Charlotte crawled into bed, she found a notebook on her pillow.

“It’s mine,” Anne said shyly. “I thought, since Emily’s poetry brought you such pleasure, you might like to read some of mine.”

The next day Emily punished Charlotte with a good dose of frosty silence. She skirted the offending sister all morning, aloof and unyielding. After she had ironed a small pile of linens, she laced on her boots and disappeared until the afternoon with a book of German poetry in her skirt pocket.

“Miss Emily’s in a tiff this morning, ain’t she?” said Tabby, who heard little but noticed everything.

But Charlotte was determined, and she waited out the day in strategic silence. That evening they gathered for family prayers in their father’s study, and then the three sisters retired to the dining room.

As Charlotte sat mending one of her father’s nightshirts by the light of a sputtering candle, she glanced up through her round spectacles. “Anne, do we have enough muslin to make Papa a new nightshirt? Look at this …” She held the garment up to the candlelight. “It’s threadbare—I daresay it’s a veritable work of art—all this cross-stitching …”