The Brontës

 

 

 Anne, Emily, and Charlotte Brontë.  Image courtesy of National Portrait Gallery, UK.

 

Back in 2015 (according to my Kindle), I read one novel by each of the three Brontë sisters.  This year, I decided to read the remaining four.  That led me to reread Jane Eyre.  Then I went further down the rabbit hole, reading two biographies of Charlotte.

All of the sisters’ books are recommended, except The Professor.  Of the lesser-known works, I would especially recommend The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and Shirley.

Anne Brontë, Agnes Grey (1847), The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848)

Agnes Grey is a harrowing tale of a governess trying to make a living while at the mercy of uncaring employers.  According to Gaskell’s biography of Charlotte, Anne pretty literally describes her own experience as a governess.  (This business of repurposing true-life events is characteristic of the Brontë sisters.)  Like much of the Brontës’ work, the precarious economic status of women is an underlying theme.  And, like many of the sentimental novels of the time, Anne is eventually rescued by marriage.

I wrote about The Tenant of Wildfell Hall back in 2015.

Charlotte Brontë, The Professor (1847? Published posthumously 1857), Jane Eyre (1847), Shirley (1849), Villette (1853)

Both The Professor and Villette are semi-autobiographical novels of Charlotte’s time in Brussels.  She went there to improve her French, which would make it easier for her to get a job as a governess.  While there, she taught at a private girls’ boarding school run by M. and Mme. Heger.  Charlotte fell in love with M. Heger and seems to have had a crush on him the rest of her life.

The Professor is the only Brontë book written from point of view of a man.  Unable to sell it, Charlotte reworked some of the material in Villette.  In the latter book, the protagonist, Lucy Snowe, is a lightly fictionalized version of Charlotte.  Lucy has a series of adventures while teaching at a girls’ boarding school and falling in love with her French teacher.  In the end, Lucy and her beloved are separated; the ending of the novel is ambiguous.  The book is noted for the close psychological examination of Lucy.  Warning: there is lots of untranslated French in both books.  Luckily for me, Kindles have autotranslate!

Jane Eyre is both the novel that made Charlotte famous and her most famous novel.   Harman’s biography says that the Brontës added anger to Austen.  That’s certainly on display here in her biting portrayal of a charity school (a fictionalized version of the school that probably was responsible for the deaths--from disease—of the two oldest Brontë sisters). The bulk of the book is a “Christian feminist” account of a woman who takes charge of her own life, moving and changing jobs as her moral sense dictates.   In an era when women weren’t even supposed to travel unescorted, her resolve and independence were startling to its original readers.  On the other hand, those readers would have readily accepted the outrageous coincidences, as they are typical of sentimental novels of the time.

Shirley is a historical novel set in Yorkshire during the Napoleonic Wars. Times are hard: a trade embargo has destroyed the export-dependent wool business.  On top of this, mechanization of the mills is causing mass unemployment and labor unrest.  Charlotte works actual Yorkshire events into the narrative.

Shirley Keeldar is another strong female protagonist.  Coming into an inheritance that includes a woolen mill, she decides not to do the decent thing, which is to marry a man and leave it to him to run everything.  Instead, she rents the mill and runs the rest of the estate herself.  And when a crisis comes, she’s the level-headed one.  Shirley is more explicitly feminist than Jane Eyre, in the sense that Shirley and her good friend Caroline Helstone complain to each other about the status of women.  I found Shirley to be the most engaging and fun to read of Charlotte’s novels.

Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (1847)                                          

I didn’t reread this one and can’t find anything I wrote about it in 2015.

Mrs. Elizabeth Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857)

This is the first biography of Charlotte, written by her friend and fellow novelist shortly after Charlotte’s death.  Gaskell was pretty frank in places but still elided some details of Charlotte’s love life.  Another irritation for modern readers is that Gaskell does not offer detailed reviews of Charlotte’s books, presumably because her readers would have been familiar with the (then recent) reviews.

Nevertheless, the book was surprisingly engaging, perhaps because so much of it consists of extracts of Charlotte’s letters.  The Portland Public Library entrusted me with a copy of the 1905 edition, which restores material deleted after the first edition under threat of libel, and includes material added in later editions.  (The restored text is flagged, so we have not only the gossip but the meta-gossip!)  Footnotes provide the identities that Mrs. Gaskell left out.

One big thing I learned: how much of Charlotte’s books were taken from life.  Not only are real incidents used in Shirley; she often transposed real figures into her books, sometimes describing them so well that the subjects recognized themselves.  (E.g., the three curates in Shirley, who took to referring to each other by the names Brontë assigned them; she was mortified.)

Still, the book left me wanting to read a modern biography that fits her work into the literature of the time, describes the reactions to the work (what, exactly, did her contemporaries find “coarse”?), and delves into details of her love life.

Although the Guardian listed this as one of the 100 best non-fiction books of all time, I really wouldn’t recommend this to the general reader.  It assumes more knowledge of Brontës’ life and times than most of us have.

Claire Harman, Charlotte Brontë: A Fiery Heart (2016)

An excellent and well-written modern biography that includes all the “shocking” material Gaskell left out, along with the benefit of another century and a half of research and with our modern understanding of human psychology and medicine.  Gives a much better feel for what life in the Brontë household was like.  (Her father!  What a piece of work!)  Psychological profiles of the Brontë family and descriptions of the area fully set Charlotte’s life in context and give us a much better view of who Charlotte was. Harman tells us why the books were both popular and shocking, and sets them in context with the development of 19^th century literature.

What Gaskell left out, by the way, was Charlotte’s “schoolgirl” (she was in her late 20s) crush on her French teacher in Brussels.  In one form or another, Constantin Heger appears in all her novels.  Pretty directly in The Professor and Villette, as Rochester in Jane Eyre, Louis Moore in Shirley.

Recommended as a companion to anyone who has read one or more Brontë novels.