Remembering the Brontes

I finished reading a novel about the life of Charlotte Bronte, Juliet Gael's Romancing Miss Bronte, this weekend. Although Jane Eyre is a favorite of mine, I didn't know a lot about Charlotte Bronte except that she and her siblings were all writers, that they lived in Yorkshire, and that their father was a minister. I pictured a strict household with few creature comforts set in a bleak, stormy landscape, where the only luxury was that of imagination. According to Miss Gael, that seems to have been close to the truth, although she paints a sensitive, nuanced portrait of the place and the people that lets you understand how such remarkable writing could have been produced under such difficult circumstances.

The author does a wonderful job of making Charlotte come alive, and I considered her as a real person for the first time while reading this novel. Gael based her book on extensive research, so that the main outline of the story is firmly grounded in real events. I never knew anything about Charlotte's love life, but she did eventually marry and seems to have found her soulmate after several stillborn romances. It seemed at first that she was doomed never to find what she needed in a single man, but love finally found her when it almost seemed too late.

The Bronte sisters became a literary sensation with the publication of their first novels, but their pseudonyms caused some confusion. Since some people initially believed Currer, Acton, and Ellis Bell to be a single person, not only did Charlotte get notoriety for the (some said) scandalous nature of Jane Eyre, but she also took some heat for Wuthering Heights (her sister Emily's book). Since Wuthering Heights was even wilder and less conventional than Jane Eyre, Charlotte became quite a celebrity without anyone knowing who she really was.

When, in the novel, Charlotte and her sister Anne show up in London, Charlotte's publisher can hardly believe from her plain appearance and demure demeanor that she is the creator of the passionate Jane and her moody employer, Mr. Rochester. We as readers have been given a look at her inner life and past, so we know that the emotional content of her novel is taken directly from experience. Emily, likewise, is a genuine product of her environment and calls things as she sees them. Heathcliff and Cathy spring directly from the soil and rocks of the moors, and their raw, tempestuous qualities reflect the harsh elements, the wind, the weather, and the dirt, that Emily knew intimately and loved.

What is very striking in Romancing Miss Bronte is the way in which the setting, the impoverished village of Haworth (so unpromising and seemingly inhospitable in the opening scenes) proves to be such a rich resource for the sensitive imaginations of the sisters and their brother, Branwell. Like true Romantics, Charlotte and Emily elevate feeling and the power of nature, but the result is not castles in the air but unvarnished portraits of the human condition. It isn't hard to see the moor as a metaphor for the unconscious, where all of the shadow elements -- adulterous love, primitive passion, and violence, those things deemed improper to acknowledge in polite society -- roam about unfettered.

The poet John Keats, another favorite of mine and also a Romantic, was already dead when the Brontes were small children, and, like them, was a consumptive. I am wondering how he would have stood up against the personalities of these sisters had they ever met. I somehow imagine Charlotte and Emily, at least, as Maenads who could have easily torn poor Keats apart.

I am still waiting for a film production of Jane Eyre that does it complete justice. I have seen three or four productions, and they either get Jane right and Rochester wrong, or vice versa. I have seen a production of Wuthering Heights on PBS that scared the crap out of me and was probably closer to what Emily had in mind than any version ever made. I'd watch it with the lights on, if I were you. Come to think of it, I'd watch Jane Eyre the same way. These women cut things pretty close to the bone.