This book tells the stories of Charlotte Bronte’s last years and the writing of Elizabeth Gaskell’s biography. Unusually, Watson takes the command ‘show don’t tell’ and applies it to the writing of a biography, narrating events, but leaving his readers to draw their own conclusions. The style, with its obsession with the weather, hard journeys, long descriptions of the interior of houses, lingering descriptions of death bed details, and the portrayal of his characters as martyrs, echoes the novels of his protagonists.
1
Perhaps after all, the truth about Charlotte Bronte was just as Elizabeth expected from the moment she had met her seven years earlier: that after a life time of emotional starvation and grief, one of the most talented women of her generation was harried and manipulated by the men around her into their serf, that her wish for concord, balance and stability had been exploited into defeated compromise by all those who needed none and, broken in spirit, she crawled, she knelt, then she tremulously stood until the hammer blows of tragedy rained upon her again (p. 231).
It's a fine paragraph. It epitomises a version of Charlotte’s life. It also reveals what’s wrong with this book. Charlotte is often, as here, presented as a victim. But her life is not all that different to thousands of women of her class, in her position. They served as governesses, and hated it. They worked as teachers when they didn’t want to in a system that ground down teachers and pupils. They looked after widowed fathers or unmarried brothers because their society had no other outlet for them. And compared to millions living in the new urban slums, her life was one of genteel ease. Howarth parsonage was not an isolated place on the moors. There were people in the village. If the Brontes didn’t want to socialise with people they thought of as inferior that was their choice.
“One of the Most talented women of her generation”. One of the most talented writers perhaps, but Charlotte and her sisters were lucky to be talented in a way their culture found acceptable for women. Women who might have been talented in other ways had no chance. There were no doctors, or lawyers. Universities were barred to them, the visual arts and music were difficult to access. ‘Harried and manipulated’ are value judgements this book doesn’t investigate. After the publication of Jane Eyre doors opened in the literary world she and her sisters had dreamt about. That she couldn’t walk through doesn’t mean they weren’t open.
Specific to this book is that ‘perhaps’ which begins the sentence.
In a book about ‘The invention of Charlotte Bronte’ you might expect some analysis of this ‘truth’, or some attempt to see how such a story came to dominate alternative ones. Watson offers no such analysis.
If you’re looking for some new information or insight into Charlotte’s life, or Gaskell’s biography, there isn’t any. The perspective provided by over a century of fossicking in the small details of Charlotte’s life is missing. The material has been picked over since Charlotte’s death. The essential debates: was Cowan bridge school a nightmare; was Charlotte’s childhood as grim as she presented it, what exactly was her relationship with three men: her father, her husband, and her Belgian Professor? If you’re waiting for a verdict, a weighing of the evidence, or even a statement of the current consensus, you will be disappointed. The book is happy to narrate.
The subtitle of the book points to its structural flaw. It has two halves, and they don’t seem to have been introduced to each other. Logically, Charlotte’s relationship with her future biographer could be the subject of the first half, but Gaskell fades in and out and it’s padded with familiar stories from her last few years. The only coherence is chronological. The second part details the writing of Gaskell’s biography and its immediate reception. Presumably this is the ‘scandal that made her’ though it could be argued Jane Eyre deserves that title. The jacket blurb hints at ‘Illicit love’.
The title suggests the ‘real Charlotte’ has gone missing, has been recreated out of the facts as a figure that that isn’t ‘factual’, but there’s no analysis to distinguish between ‘truth’ and ‘invention’.
2
What the book does, perhaps inadvertently, is demonstrate the problems of writing a biography and the dangers of using biography to illuminate a writer’s work.
Charlotte and her sisters wrote fiction. They took the material available and transmuted it into novels that people are still reading and admiring over a century and a half later. For Charlotte, her version of her childhood gave her material for Jane Eyre. What should matter for fiction is what she did with her memories, not how accurate the memories were.
Since the publication of Jane Eyre, people have been rummaging through Charlotte’s books in search of ‘the originals’ for places, characters and incidents. The search has fuelled, and been fuelled by, a Bronte industry with Howarth its official shine and the sisters as secular martyrs.
The Wikipedia entry for William Carus Wilson bluntly states:
William Carus Wilson was an English churchman and the founder and editor of the long-lived monthly The Children's Friend. He was the inspiration for Mr Brocklehurst, the autocratic head of Lowood School, depicted by Charlotte Brontë in her 1847 novel Jane Eyre.
Jane Eyre was published as an autobiography ‘edited by Currer Bell’. But the literary game Charlotte was playing became a stick to beat her art and her books even when the pretence was dropped. The desire of readers to track down ‘originals’ suggests an inability or reluctance to accept fiction as invention, and a preference for gossip and scandal over the pleasures of reading. Or perhaps suggests gossip and scandal were as much an essential part of the pleasures of reading fiction over 150 years ago as they seem to be today.
Readers will either be convinced imaginatively by the horrors of Lowood school and repelled by the bigoted hypocrisy of Mr. Brocklehurst or dismiss both as incredible. What or who these were ‘based’ on is irrelevant. Fiction is a culturally sanctioned form of lying. For a reader who thinks Lowood and Brocklehurst are overdone, being told that they are based on Cowan Bridge and William Carus Wilson, and both were that bad in reality doesn’t make the portrait any more believable. It just adds a qualification: this is unconvincing even if it’s based on real people and places.
Once the game of ‘who is based on whom’ was underway the ‘public truth’ mattered for the owners of Cowan Bridge school, or William Carus Wilson and his son, or the Hegers, and for Mr. Bronte. Madame Heger may have resented Charlotte not because she suspected she was having an affair with her husband but because the identification of her school with the one in Villette ruined the school.
The factual, provable truth, matters for a biographer. But often it’s not possible to establish it beyond doubt. Charlotte’s relationship with Monsieur Heger. Was their relationship sexual? Was it reciprocal? Or did Charlotte invest her imagination in a fantasy that was never requited?
Who was Charlotte Bronte? There are versions of her, there were versions of her even in her own lifetime. Is ‘the truth’ the point where all the versions overlap, the total of them all, or one out of the many? Watson implies Charlotte was trying to control the narrative, telling the story of her harsh childhood and schooling to everyone who listened. She tried to control the reception of her sisters’ work when their books were posthumously reissued. She was determined to establish her version.
Gaskell had met Charlotte and was able to interview many of the key characters in her life. She struggled to find objective truth, dealing with perception, memory and bias. Eyewitnesses did not remember or remembered and then recanted. Others didn’t feel able to speak publicly about what they knew.
When Gaskell started to read her correspondence, she discovered that Charlotte presented a different version of herself to different correspondents. Each batch ‘presented to her a different woman, remade to something more agreeable than Charlotte felt herself to be from each of her contacts’. One of those contacts, Harriet Martineau, reading Charlotte’s letter to others, ‘concluded Charlotte had been disingenuous’. Others called her a pathological liar.
The problem of the truth wouldn’t go away. The story of Branwell’s ‘affair’ with his employer’s wife required tact as the lady in question was still alive. There were versions but who to believe: Branwell? Charlotte? The wife? Even at the time establishing the truth of what happened was impossible.
Watson tends to present Elizabeth Gaskell in a positive light, but she must have known that ‘telling the truth’ would hurt people who were alive. Some of Charlotte’s friends encouraged this as a form of second hand revenge, but the publisher’s lawyers were always going to be nervous and the second edition of the life was suitably altered.
For anyone who deals with time periods much earlier than the 19th century, it’s a common thought that if only more information survived, we could know the characters in our histories so much better. In an absence of diaries, letters, journals, the testimony of people who knew our subjects, they are often little more than a name and some dates.
What this book shows is that even with an abundance of evidence, even when the eye- witnesses and participants can be interviewed, beyond the dates and places, ‘who was Charlotte Bronte’ was not and is not a simple question.
That thought has to undermine any approach to her fiction, or anyone else’s, which justifies itself by recourse to biography. We can know Jane Eyre, because all the information about her is in the book that bears her name. We cannot know Charlotte Bronte with similar confidence. Trying to use Charlotte’s life to illuminate her novels is using one fiction to read another.
