The Secret Diaries of Charlotte Brontë (27 page)

Every day, I prayed that papa would come and release us from our prison; instead, when papa did return in late November, he brought six-year-old Emily to join us. His stay was brief, and we were only permitted a few minutes’ audience with him. There was so much I wanted to tell him, but Maria made me promise not to breathe a word.

By now, Mr. Wilson had hired a new superintendent to manage the school. Miss Ann Evans was thirty years old, tall and lovely, and always impeccably dressed; she also had a sensitive nature. When I asked her to allow Emily to be my bed-fellow, so that I might more readily watch over her, my request was granted.

December came. The weather grew harsh and cold; we shivered in our beds, and the water in the ewers froze, making it impossible to wash. An early and deep snowfall made the road impassable, but we were still required to spend an hour every day in the open air of the frozen garden, and to walk more than two miles across the sweeping rise and fall of a snowy, exposed path every Sunday to church. Having no gloves, we arrived at church paralysed with cold, our hands numbed and covered with chilblains;
⁵³
ditto our feet, for having no boots, the snow crept into our shoes and melted there.

We sat through the all-day service frozen, with wet feet. In late afternoon, as my sisters and I trudged back to school in the long line of dejected girls and teachers, we wrapped our purple cloaks tightly about us, squeezing our eyes to slits against the bitter winter wind, which cut through our clothing and flayed our cheeks raw. Upon our return, we were treated to further Bible study and a long sermon by Miss Pilcher, during which Emily and I, and many of the other younger girls, often dropped in exhaustion from the benches to the floor.

Maria had developed a little cough that autumn, which she insisted was a lingering remnant of the whooping-cough. By late January, however, her cough was worse, and she grew increasingly weak and pale. Then Elizabeth caught a bad chill on one of our Sunday walks, and developed a cough of her own. Several other pupils suffered from similar complaints, which the teaching staff attributed to typical winter colds. One afternoon, I was alarmed to see that Maria’s handkerchief, after she
was seized by a coughing fit, was tinged with blood. I gave intelligence of the event to Miss Evans; she called in Dr. Batty, who examined my sister.

A few days later, when I rose to dress at the first morning bell, I noticed that Maria was not in her bed. I applied to Miss Pilcher, who informed me that Maria had been removed to Miss Evans’s quarters during the night.

“Why?” I asked, filled with sudden, unspeakable dread.

“We believe she has consumption,”
⁵⁴
said Miss Pilcher tersely, as she shut her door in my face.

I had never heard of consumption. The apprehension I had witnessed on Miss Pilcher’s countenance implied that this was no simple childhood illness, from which one would easily recover. For the first time in my life, I was seized by the thought that my sister might die, and I felt a shock of horror and grief.

“I
must
see Maria,” I told my sisters, as we headed towards the dining-hall that morning.

“How can you?” said Elizabeth. “She is with Miss Evans.”

“Then that is where I shall find her.”

When the teachers were looking the other way, I slipped out of line and out the door; with pounding heart, I dashed along the pebbly path to the cottage I knew belonged to Miss Evans. She admitted me with barely a word, explaining that I would find my sister in her bedroom. I crossed the apartment to the adjoining chamber, where, beside the larger bed, I saw a huddled form lying on a narrow cot. I advanced, terrified. Was it Maria? Was she alive or dead?

“Charlotte,” said Maria in her gentle voice as I approached, “why are you here? Should you not be at breakfast?”

I sat down on the stool beside Maria’s bed with relief. Although she was pale, and her eyes looked feverish, she was not much changed from the day before. “They told me you were ill. I was worried about you.”

“Do not worry, Charlotte. Miss Evans has written to papa and asked him to come and take me home.”

“I am glad. I shall miss you, but the fresh air of the moors will cure you.” A coughing spell took hold of her; I winced at the effort it required for her to endure the lengthy spasms. “I wish there was something I could do to ease your suffering.”

“There is. You can make me a promise.”

“What promise?”

“If you hear that I have died, promise me you will not grieve.”

A hot pang seared my chest and throat. “Maria, you are
not
going to die.”

“I do not wish to. But if it is the Lord’s will that I should die, I must accept it and be grateful for the time I have had on earth.”

“How can you be grateful? You are far too young to die!”

“We all must die one day. My only regret is that I shall not have more time to spend with papa and you and all my family.”

Tears welled in my eyes. “Are you very afraid?” I whispered.

Maria’s eyes shone with courage and intelligence as she said softly, “No, I am not afraid. If I die, I will go to God. He will be revealed to me in heaven. He is our father and our friend, and I love Him.”

A few days later, papa retrieved Maria from school. Over the next three months, while I clung to the belief that Maria was happy at home and getting well, conditions at the school turned from bad to worse. With the advent of spring, a new menace came to Cowan Bridge. The establishment lay in a low forest dell near a river, at times surrounded by dense fog, which brought moisture into the crowded schoolroom and dormitory, and became a breeding ground for typhus. By early April, nearly a third of the pupils, already weak from semi-starvation, had fallen ill. A doctor was called in. He condemned the preparation of the food, and the cook was dismissed. Ten more girls left school in declining health; I learned that six of them died soon after reaching home.

Emily and I somehow escaped the ravages of the typhoid fever, but Elizabeth did not. She was sent to the crowded hospital ward in the seminary, which I visited at every opportunity.

The second week of May, Emily and I were called in to a private meeting with Miss Evans in her study. I still remember what she wore that day: a lovely frock of deep violet silk, with a black lace collar and a black ribbon around her throat.

“Girls,” said Miss Evans, in a solemn voice, “I received a letter from your father to-day. I am so sorry to tell you this, but your sister Maria has passed away.”

Emily and I cried ourselves to sleep that night in each other’s arms. Were we truly never again to hear our sweet Maria’s voice? Were we never again to see her gentle smile, or feel the warmth of her motherly embrace? Of course, we could not go to the funeral; home was too far away.

Two weeks later, the doctor, upon examining Elizabeth again, determined that she had never suffered from typhus after all; she was in fact in the final stages of consumption, the same disease which had killed Maria. Emily and I watched helplessly as a servant lifted Elizabeth aboard the public coach to Keighley, which quickly drove away. Papa was shocked when a private gig drew up unannounced at Haworth parsonage with Elizabeth aboard. He took one look at her wasted face, the mirror image of Maria’s only weeks before, and after remanding her to Aunt Branwell’s care, he immediately came and rescued Emily and myself.

“You will never go back to that school,” proclaimed a tearful papa as we journeyed home, “and that’s the end of it.”

How shall I describe the relief that Emily and I felt at leaving behind, once and for all, the hardships of the Clergy Daughters’ School, and returning to our beloved home? It was a relief, however, that was tempered by enormous sadness: it was a home without Maria, and soon without Elizabeth. For Elizabeth’s illness was so advanced, that she died just two weeks after reaching Haworth.

Tears stung my eyes as—twenty-one years later—I stood at the window of our lodgings in Manchester and reflected on the loss of my two beloved sisters. My grief and resentment was as fresh and deep to-day as if the harrowing events had only just occurred. If, at that moment, a genie had granted my dearest wish, I would have asked him to send me back in time to when my sisters were still alive, so that I might embrace them once more; I would have asked, too, for a private moment with my younger self, so that I might provide her with hope, solace, and comfort.

As I sadly processed these thoughts and memories, a realisation struck me; I was suddenly overcome by a chill that caused the hair on the back of my neck to stand on end; it was followed by a surge of heat, and the rapid pounding of my heart.

All at once, I knew what I should write next.

That anguished, lonely little school-girl, so miserable, starved and deprived—whose every thought and feeling I still recalled so vividly, to the depth of my very being—
I could write about her.

Drawing on my own experience, I could fearlessly invest that little girl with all the emotion I wished, and deliver the kind of passionate story that I had so enjoyed writing in the past. The idea sent a thrill coursing through me, and my mind continued to work, all in a tumult. My main character should be motherless, I decided—
that
was something I knew about—and unwanted by the family who raised her. Perhaps she could grow up to be a governess; that was something I knew about, too.

There must be a romance, of course; I could add elements of the strange, the startling, and the harrowing, akin to the tales I had penned in my youth. But this would be no typical novel, I decided, about a young woman of great beauty—no! I would try something very different this time, from the stories I had written, and the books I had read: I would create a small, plain heroine, like myself. I could name her after one of my sisters; but no, that would be too blatant; instead, I would use Emily’s middle name: Jane.

Whether or not such a story would meet with approval from a publisher or the reading public, I could not be certain; I only knew that I must proceed.
This
was the book I was meant to write next.

I sat down at my desk. I seized a sheet of paper. By the flickering light of a single candle, I dipped my pen in my ink pot.

And I began to write
Jane Eyre.

T
he first chapters of
Jane Eyre
poured out in a frenzy. Over the next five weeks, as I waited for my father to recuperate from his surgery, I wrote all day, every day, and most of the nights as well. It was the first time I had ever written from a woman’s point of view, and it felt so incredibly
right
.

The sense of extreme isolation and loneliness I had endured as a governess, I invested in my depiction of Jane as a child at Gateshead, unloved and unwanted by the Reeds. I re-created my life at the Clergy Daughters’ School, and evoked the memory of my gentle, patient sister Maria in Jane’s angelic but doomed friend, Helen Burns. Perhaps it was the intensely personal nature of these memories, bound up as they were by my terrible anger and grief caused by my sisters’ deaths, that caused me to write
Jane Eyre
with a zeal that I had never before encountered in any of my earlier literary efforts. I wrote in a white heat; I wrote as if my very life depended on it; I wrote in a fervent articulation of all the pent-up emotion that had been fermenting in my soul for years. Every word I penned felt so real and true—as indeed it was, for it was inspired by fact—it seemed as if I
were merely taking dictation from some otherworldly, magical source.

While I wrote, to my joy and relief, my father’s health and vision improved daily. The surgeon continued to express his satisfaction at the success of the operation, and assured us that papa’s eyesight would be perfectly restored in that one eye; ere long, he would be able to both read and write.

We returned home at the end of September with high hopes. Two months later, papa was so recovered as to be able to return to active duty. Meanwhile, I continued to write obsessively. Other memories and incidents from my own life, past and present, found their way into my novel. Thornfield Hall became a fusion of North Lees Hall and Ellen’s childhood home, The Rydings. My fascination with attics and their mysterious occupants became a central theme, embellished by stories of the West Indies which I had been told by a friend at the Clergy Daughters’ School, Mellany Hane, who had once resided in that exotic land.

The quiet, humble life enjoyed by my sisters and me was reflected in Diana and Mary Rivers and Jane at Moor House; the Rivers’s good servant Hannah was the personification of Tabby. Many of the inner conflicts explored by the heroines in the stories of my youth found a new home in Jane Eyre’s tale—and an alarming accident which occurred at home the very autumn of its composition inspired a similar mishap, allowing Jane to save Mr. Rochester from grave danger.

The mishap occurred on a mid-afternoon in early November. Papa was out. My sisters and I had just entered the parsonage after a walk on the moors with the dogs. Moments after Anne went upstairs, we heard a scream and a crash. Greatly frightened, Emily and I raced up after her, immediately aware of a strong smell of burning. As we reached the upper landing, I saw blue wreaths of smoke rushing in a cloud from Branwell’s room.

“Branwell’s bedclothes are on fire!” cried Anne frantically from his doorway. “He will not wake up!”

In an instant we were all within the chamber, which was close and dark. Great tongues of flame leapt at the curtains hanging around Branwell’s bed, and had begun to incinerate the coverlets and sheets. In the midst of the heat and blaze, Branwell lay stretched and motionless, in his typical day-time stupor. His water-jug lay in pieces on the floor; I guessed that Anne had hurled its contents at the conflagration, to no good effect.

“Branwell! Branwell! Wake up! Wake up!” I shouted, shaking him, but he only murmured in his sleep and turned, oblivious.

“Get more water!” cried Emily. Anne raced out. While Emily dragged Branwell out of bed and flung him unceremoniously into the corner (where he awoke and shrank back against the wall, screaming in terror and confusion), I heaved the flaming bedclothes into the centre of the room and began beating them with a blanket. Emily seized my brother’s coat from a chair and attacked the flames which enveloped the curtains. Anne and Martha both returned with cans of water from the kitchen; they joined the battle against the inferno, and at last we succeeded in extinguishing it. The hiss of the quenched elements surrounded us as we all stood in the small chamber, choking and waving away the vapour. I opened the window. Branwell continued to scream in the corner like an idiot.

“You stupid fool!” exclaimed Emily, whirling on him. “You know better than to go to sleep with a candle burning! You could have burnt the house down!”

It took all the rest of the afternoon and evening to clean up the mess, and some months before we managed to replace the damaged covers and curtains on the bed. From that day forward, Branwell was forbidden to have a light when left alone, and we hid all the candles, changing their storage place with regularity so that he could never find them. Furthermore, papa—who had always been deeply concerned about the dangers of fire—insisted that Branwell sleep in his room in future, so that he could prevent him from coming to further harm. The two men shared a bed every night thenceforth, for the remainder of Branwell’s life.

As I wrote, a year sped by. During this time, the forlorn little parcel with our three other manuscripts made its rounds to a succession of publishers, meeting with rejection after rejection. Emily seemed to lose heart at this lack of interest in our work, but Anne did not; she began a new book of her own. As before, we met every evening to share what we were working on.

One night in midwinter 1847, when I had read aloud the latest chapter of my half-completed manuscript, Emily said with uncharacteristic enthusiasm, “It is very good, Charlotte. I believe this is the best thing you have ever written. The mystery is so compelling, I can barely wait to hear the next chapter.”

“I love it, too,” said Anne quietly. “Jane is so real; my heart goes out to her. I do worry a bit, though, about the way you portray religion in the novel. Sometimes it seems as if you wish to do away with morality.”

“I take no stand on morality here. It is only a story.”

“But in making Mr. Rochester your hero,” persisted Anne, “you seem to be glorifying certain very base qualities. He is a very domineering man, with so many past mistresses, and he has an illegitimate child.”

“Do not be such a prig, Anne,” countered Emily. “I adore Mr. Rochester. Can you not see that he is, in every way, the embodiment of Charlotte’s beloved Duke of Zamorna? It is those same
base
qualities that made the Duke so vital and interesting before, and they are no less fascinating to read about to-day.” To me, she added, “I am amused, however, that you chose to make Mr. Rochester small, dark, irascible, and far from handsome. This, and his penchant for cigar-smoking, bears a greater resemblance to Monsieur Héger than your Duke.”

I blushed at this observation. “I suppose I did model Mr. Rochester’s
physical
likeness a bit after Monsieur Héger.”

All the stories I had written in my youth contributed, in some way, to my new effort, and my sisters recognised each and every reference with enthusiasm.

When I revealed the truth about Bertha Mason, Anne cried,
“It reminds me of
The Fairy Gift
—but it is so much more thrilling!” I had quite forgotten that tale, which I had written at age thirteen, about a hero who was given four wishes. Although he wished to marry a beauty, he was given instead a horribly ugly and villainously strong wife, who haunted the corridors and stairways of a great mansion and tried to strangle him.

When I read the scene where Mr. Rochester tests Jane’s love in the garden, Emily said, “That was very well done. The way he tortures her, step by step, before finally revealing his love—it is just like the Duke of Zamorna’s jealous trial of Mina Laury, as well as that other story you wrote—where Sir William Percy begs Elizabeth Hastings to be his mistress.”
⁵⁵

“Yes,” agreed I, “and Anne, as always, should be pleased with the outcome—since Jane, like Elizabeth Hastings, takes the moral line and flees from temptation.”

I completed
Jane Eyre
in early summer 1847, and had begun to make a fair-copy, but was obliged to put my work aside when Ellen came to visit us for a few weeks. My sisters and I always looked forward to Ellen’s visits. In the sixteen years since Ellen and I first met at school, a warm affection had developed between her and Emily and Anne, and she was now considered almost as one of the family.

“I see no reason why I cannot tell Nell about the book,” I said to Emily before Ellen arrived. “It would be easier on all of us if we could continue our work in the evenings, while Nell is here.”

“No,” insisted Emily. “I do not want her, or any one, to know about our writing. Our books have been rejected by every publisher to whom you sent them, and our book of poetry did so poorly—it is too humiliating!”

“We
will
sell our novels,” I told Emily, despite the growing doubt that gnawed at me with each new rejection. “We have only to persevere and be patient.”

Papa had long since regained his health and eyesight in such full measure, that he had been able to resume all his usual duties in the parish. Mr. Nicholls, who had carried papa’s entire burden for so long in duty, if not in title, was again relegated to his lesser role as curate. To his credit, Mr. Nicholls accepted this demotion with humility and grace, professing his continued delight and relief in my father’s recovery. Every day, however, we expected Mr. Nicholls to accept a new post elsewhere, where he might take charge of his own parish—a promotion which, despite my own personal misgivings about him, I had to admit he certainly deserved. To my surprise, this never happened.

“I know why Mr. Nicholls does not leave,” said Ellen during her visit in early July.

My sisters, Ellen, and I were relaxing lazily at one of our favourite spots, far out on the purple-tinged heath, hidden in an embankment along Sladen Beck, a place we called “The Meeting of the Waters.” This secluded oasis of emerald green turf was dotted with small, clear springs that converged together in the stream, and at this season, it was festooned with clusters of brilliantly-coloured flowers. Since childhood, we had spent countless summer days dallying in this idyllic paradise, removed from all the world, basking in the pure joy of friendship, beneath a glorious canopy of cloudless blue.

All four of us were now seated or reclining, bonnetless, on one of the large, smooth grey rocks that lay scattered here and there within and beside the ponds, as if tossed by some giant hand; our skirts were hiked up indecorously to our knees, and our bare feet dangled in the sparkling, cold water.

“I caught a glimpse of Mr. Nicholls in the hall at the parsonage this morning, when he came to see your father,” Ellen went on. “I think he stays in Haworth, despite the lack of advancement to his career, because he likes
you,
Charlotte.”

“That is absurd,” said I.

“It is not,” replied Ellen.

“I tell Charlotte this all the time,” said Anne, splashing her feet happily in the water, “but she will not listen.”

“Did you see the way he looked at you, when he entered the house?” asked Ellen.

“I did not.”

“He had the same expression on his countenance that I used to see on Mr. Vincent’s, when he came to court me: awkward shyness and concealed admiration, all mingled with reserve and fear. He was hoping for a word or a look from you; yet you did not even glance his way.”

I thought Ellen must be dreaming, and told her so.

“I
did
notice him lingering in the passage, eyeing you covertly,” interjected Emily, who was lying, stomach down, on a large rock, sweeping her hand through the clear, shallow water and making the tadpoles dart about.

“Mr. Nicholls is always pleasant to me,” observed Ellen. “He has been good to your father, and such a big help in the parish. Why do you dislike him so?”

I glanced briefly at my sisters, who caught my eye but remained silent. I had never told Ellen the story about Bridget Malone, believing it would be wrong to spread malicious gossip which could prove detrimental to Mr. Nicholls’s career; neither had I told her about the mean-spirited comment Mr. Nicholls had made behind my back when he first came to Haworth, some two years before.

“I am afraid Mr. Nicholls is not the vision of perfection that you imagine him to be, Nell,” said I, as I lay back on the rock and tilted my face up to revel in the warmth of the sun. “It would be indiscreet of me to say why; but not every one in Haworth loves him as well as you do.”

A week later, Ellen had a chance to witness an example of Mr. Nicholls’s unpopular behaviour first-hand. Ever since Mr. Nicholls’s arrival in Haworth, he had been speaking out against the washerwomen’s weekly practice of drying their wet laundry over the table-shaped tombstones in the Haworth churchyard. He was still complaining about it two years later.

“A churchyard should be a revered place of solitude and re
spect, in remembrance of the deceased,” I had heard Mr. Nicholls say to papa a few months earlier, when I served their tea. “This spectacle is a mockery, akin to holding a weekly picnic on holy ground.”

“I think it rather charming,” I had interjected. “All the women gathered out in the churchyard with their baskets of laundry, chatting away gaily in the breeze. It puts the graveyard to practical use, and makes it seem less gloomy. It is a place for them all to meet once a week.”

“It gets them out of their back-yards,” agreed papa. “I am told they look forward to it.”

“Well, I mean to put an end to it,” Mr. Nicholls had said.

And so he did. He waged a long battle with the trustees of the church, and at length achieved his aim. At services one Sunday in July, Mr. Nicholls made a startling announcement:

“From this day forth, the hanging of laundry shall no longer be allowed in the Haworth churchyard. Ladies, you shall please find a more suitable and respectable place to dry your wet garments.”