The Bronte Sisters (3 page)

One night in June 1826, the Reverend Brontë returned from a trip to Leeds, bringing Branwell a set of toy soldiers. The next morning, Branwell took the soldiers to the bedroom that Charlotte and Emily shared. “I snatched one up
and exclaimed, ‘this is the Duke of Wellington! It shall be mine!’” Charlotte recalled years later. Emily chose one, too, and when Anne woke up, so did she. “Emily’s was a grave-looking fellow. We called him Gravey,” Charlotte said. “Anne’s was a queer little thing very much like herself. He was called Waiting Boy. Branwell chose Bonaparte.” (Branwell had read
The Life of the Emperor Napoleon.
) The children later renamed Gravey and Waiting Boy after two Arctic explorers, Sir William Parry and Captain John Ross.

This simple gift of wooden soldiers inspired a world of activity. The children invented intricate games, or “plays,” to be acted by their soldier characters. In the first one, “Young Men,” the soldiers conquered lands in Africa, that strange, far-off continent that the children read about in
Blackwood’s Magazine.
The soldiers clashed with one another for power, but they eventually united to form the “Glass Town Confederacy.” The four children were the “Genii,” who could restore any soldier to life, to have him ready for the next game.

The games grew complex as the children created more characters to play out their fantasies: kings, dukes, explorers, and elegant women for the men to love and fight for. Charlotte and Branwell imagined a kingdom called Angria, where these figures acted their dramas. Emily and Anne got tired of the small roles assigned to them by their older siblings and withdrew to start their own saga. Their imaginary adventures happened in Gondal, an island nation in the Pacific. Gondal’s ruler, King Julius, loved the beautiful but treacherous Augusta.

All four children knew how to draw, so they made maps of their territories and portraits of their favorite characters. They also wrote stories, poems, and imaginary histories of Angria and Gondal. In an action-packed story titled “The Pirate,” Branwell described a battle between one of his invented heroes, Alexander Percy, and Satan:

Crying, “I have done
with thee, thou wretch”, [Percy] took the ugly heap of mortality and hurled it into the sea. When it touched the water a bright flash of fire darted from it, changed it into a vast genius of immeasurable and indefinable height and size, and seizing hold of a huge cloud with his hand, he vaulted into it, crying: “And I’ve done with thee, thou fool” and disappeared among the passing vapours.

It is easy to imagine a boy acting out scenes like this with his toy figures, speaking their words aloud and adding sound effects.

Charlotte wrote on tiny pages in letters so minuscule that some could be read only with a magnifying glass. She then sewed these sheets into books. She often wrote from the characters’ points of view, as if they were the real authors of the stories and poems she produced. She created historical accounts of Angria and its people, and she wrote out long scripts, imagining the poetic lines her characters would speak to each other.

Much of Branwell’s and Charlotte’s childhood writing has survived the passage of time, but most of Emily and Anne’s early Gondal chronicles were either lost or destroyed. Emily copied forty-four of her Gondal poems into a notebook, but she was already eighteen years old when she wrote the first of these. (The Brontës continued to imagine life in Gondal and Angria even after they were grown.) Emily was a gifted poet, and the beauty and emotional power of her lines can affect even readers who have never heard of Gondal:

Come, the wind may never again

Blow as now it blows for us

And the stars may never again, shine as now they shine.

Long before October returns

Seas of blood will have parted us

And you must crush the love in your heart

And I, the love in mine!

The writing and games continued undisturbed until the Reverend Brontë came down with a cold in the summer of 1830.
The infection settled in his lungs, and for a time it seemed that he might die. Haworth’s minister was too strong-willed to give in to illness, though, and slowly, in the months that followed, he recovered. But being sick taught him that his life could end at any moment, and if he were to die, his children would be left without support.

For this reason, he arranged for fourteen-year-old Charlotte to go to school once more, to be prepared to teach. He sent her to Roe Head, in Mirfield, twenty miles to the southeast. Recommended by Charlotte’s godmother, an old family friend named Mrs. Atkinson, Roe Head was known as a clean place that welcomed pupils from respected families. So in January 1831, Charlotte journeyed in a covered cart to Roe Head School.

A
T
first, Charlotte felt sick at heart with longing for Haworth. She would steal away when the other girls went out for exercise and sit in the schoolroom’s wide bay window, crying for home. One day she thought she was alone, but another homesick new girl had sought privacy in the schoolroom, too. Ellen Nussey approached the tiny figure on the window seat and offered comfort, admitting that she needed consoling in return.

Charlotte found a lifelong friend in pretty, brown-eyed Ellen. She valued Ellen’s calm cheerfulness, writing, “When you are a little depressed
it does you good to look at Ellen and know she loves you.” Charlotte would continue to suffer from spells of depression even after her homesickness faded.

“She had ever the demeanour
of a born gentlewoman,” Ellen said about Charlotte. “She never seemed to me the unattractive little person others designated her.” The other girls laughed to themselves when they first saw Charlotte’s shabby green dress and crimped, old-womanish hairstyle, and heard the Irish accent she had picked up from her father. Charlotte was thin when she came to Roe Head, Ellen Nussey later recalled, so thin that she seemed “dried in.” She looked funny holding books close to her nose, but the girls soon grew used to her, and they learned to admire her quick mind.

Roe Head was a healthier, happier place than the Clergy Daughters’ School. It was a school for young ladies, where Miss Margaret Wooler and her four younger sisters taught classes in French, grammar, and geography. Their main purpose, though, was to give the girls a polishing, to make them shine in company and attract worthy husbands. This was why the pupils practiced poise and manners and refined their skills in dancing and music. Most of these girls would never have to teach. Knowing how to draw and do delicate needlework would fill idle hours when they were married and spent most of their time at home, so they perfected these accomplishments, too.

The school drew pupils from nearby industrial towns, where their fathers were prosperous mill owners. Their families belonged to the growing middle class that had money enough to stuff its homes with the heavy furniture, draperies, and carpets that were coming into style.

Short, stout Miss Wooler dressed in white. She braided some of her hair into a crown on top of her head and let the rest fall to her shoulders in ringlets. “Bend inclination to duty,”
she preached to the girls. In other words, a lady must stifle her instincts and do what others expected of her.

Nonsense,
declared Charlotte’s other new friend, Mary Taylor, who had no intention of obeying this rule. Ellen’s friendship gave comfort, but Mary’s offered excitement. Mary was loud and fearless and loved the outdoor games that Charlotte avoided. She was independent and never shy about speaking her mind. Once, when Miss Wooler assigned her a long passage to memorize, Mary refused to do it. She chose to accept her punishment—a month of going to bed without supper—rather than waste time on such a useless task. Mary had vowed never to wed, not as long as a woman’s property became her husband’s upon marriage. Women were wrong to choose husbands for financial security or a place in society, she believed. She also thought that all professions should be open to women who wanted to pursue them.

Mary had “a fine, generous soul,
a noble intellect profoundly cultivated, a heart as true as steel,” Charlotte observed. Charlotte, in turn, impressed Mary with the knowledge she had acquired before coming to Roe Head. She knew “things that were out of our range
altogether,” Mary said.