The Invention of Charlotte Bronte by Graham Watson

 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 19^th 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.

The Wrong Fairytale. Poems I have written #11

The Wrong Fairytale

 

Behind each ornate door 

a princess waits

to hear the words 

that set her free.

 

As you pass along 

the shadowed corridors

dragging your chains 

voices call your name 

rising and falling like the sea.

 

Born to the tidal pull of this task 

you studied the ritual; 

rehearsed the aftermath.

 

While they perfected themselves: 

brushed their hair

practised their songs

waiting for this day.

 

Now desire prowls on sharpened claws, 

but in your mouth 

the magic words are wrong. 

The doors stay shut. 

 

Step out into sunlight

to the skin tightening kiss 

of the cold sea air.

You’ll count the pebbles on the beach 

before you understand

why your shackles fell away.

 

Because sometimes you think you're in one story and you know the rules, discover you're not, and realise the discovery is painful but liberating?

This poem was first published in Rough Spun to Close Weave. Copies of the book are available from the shop at  www.liamguilar.com

The Piper's call. Poems I have written #10

 

The Piper’s Call

(Planxty: Dublin 2005) 

 

The high note, held, stretching

the space above the drone;

like wind torn spray

as the great wave, darkening, builds;

wailing like the curve of the bay, 

lean as famine, leaning into 

the blurred percussion 

of Atlantic rollers, coming home  

across unfathomable depth,

to crash onto the present

this cargo of raw, wounded memory. 

 

Like a window blasted open,

the music admits the smell of rain

drumming on the shuttered house. 

Where the locals never learn to spell 

the migrant’s name, the dancers stamp and call,

while by the fire, whiskey and stories

blur in customary gestures.

Laughter and exuberance, suspended

without resolution, above 

a strained and ruined loneliness.

Written after listening to Liam O'Flynn playing solo at Planxty's concert in Dublin in 2005.

This poem originally published in Rough Spun to close Weave.

Details can be found at WWW.liamguilar.com

What I Learnt From Watching Television Archeology (Poems I've written #9)

 

What I Learnt From Watching Television Archeology

 

We've found another body! Cut

to cleavage shots of fine young animal:

bare shoulders, swinging breasts,

definitely female. Adult, young,

still fertile. On her knees, undressing

bones; the mouth gapes and the skull,

turned sideways, concentrates

upon the probing knife.

Fade in the expert to explain

what is revealed: age

in the worn tooth. A woman,

by her pelvis.  Cause of death?

A subject for some further tests.

Linger on the living now,

back in the ditch, tanned flesh,

strong legs .  We learn so much

about a culture from the way it treats a body.

The way it is displayed for viewing

reveals the truth of what is valued.

I used to watch a famous television program devoted to archaeology. This was the reason i stopped. 

The poem is taken from 'Rough Spun to Close Weave'.  Copies and other samples available from www.liamguilar.com

THREE ACT PLAY. FICTION IN VERSE. And a parody by Marcus Bales.

A version of this poem was originally published in Meniscus. It was an early attempt   to write fiction in verse. After the poem, you can read Marcus Bales' parody.

Three Act Play.

 

1) Hotel Interior, Night

 

You were with me in the darkness, curled

on the unfamiliar bed. The nightlights

of the hotel swimming pool shimmering the room; 

the sound of surf shivering the air. 

Another dream, perhaps, until your nightmare 

shook us both awake. I held you safe until 

your breathing steadied, gentled, signaled 

you had gone far out to calmer water

where stars were fixed and distant.

The rain began, hesitant and then insistent. 

Awake alone, admiring the angle of your shoulder 

the shadows on your back. Although 

come dawn, you’d turn, smile, welcome me, 

everything we did was broken light

dancing on that isolation flesh tries to deny. 

 

2) Exterior: Early Morning Bus Stop Philosophy 

 

You left while I was sleeping. Who knows when we’ll meet again?

So consider the mini bus that will take me to the airport,

stopped at the traffic lights. How many centuries of ingenuity

produced this banal sight? Still too asleep to fumble my itinerary 

I stare out towards the estuary, imagine a rough man knapping flint,

lurching towards comfort. He could not have imagined

the bakery, the weight loss-center, gym and launderette. 

the twisted perfume of a cigarette, the woman smiling at her phone.

He’d know the wind and tide, that space where light and water 

meet and never merge but did he understand ‘alone’?

 

3) Domestic Interior: Evening Rush Hour. 

 

A good day’s work, first home, now dinner’s done. So why

do I imagine a pond too dark to fathom, beneath bare trees;

imagine being dragged down through surface scum of leaves, down 

past drowned and damaged faces adrift in the darkening cold?

Unnoticed daylight is reduced to silvered remnants on a table set for two.

Outside the traffic that she’s stuck in is a wall of noise, inside, 

fear, rising from the shadows to the dark.  

In the street, their day reflected in the way they stride  

or slouch or pause to window shop, parents sheepdog children, 

school kids shoal, all moving to and from but moving on. 

I watch them from the kitchen window, reassured and surfacing,

waiting for her footsteps on the path; the way she struggles with the lock

the way she calls me from the hall before she shuts the door,

starting the ripples which will carry us towards  morning.

If Liam Guilar had written 'I will Survive'. By MARCUS BALES

You left while I was sleeping: no goodbye 

As bad as any talk or any note, 

Because in any case I had no vote, 

And even you could not illumine why. 

I think of how a rough man knapping flint 

Inching towards comfort, could not have thought

Of memory-foam. What he knew was taught 

By close attention to each tiny hint. 

And now you're back that look upon your face 

Which once you knew that I could not resist 

Me wondering what tiny hint I've missed 

But no. Go out the door. There is no place 

For you here any more. I knap this stone 

And wonder, did that rough man know alone?

Jeremy Hooker's 'With a Stranger's eyes'.

 

Published by Shearsman Books 2025.

A longer version of this essay was first published in the Brazen Head as  The Watchful Muse clicking the link will take you there. 

With a Stranger’s Eyes is Jeremy Hooker’s third book of poems since the publication of Selected Poems 1965-2018(Shearsman 2020) and arguably the best of this later group¹. The poetry is divided into three sections, with a fourth, short prose ‘Reflections on Two Welsh Words.’ The first two sections record people, places and incidents from his past and present in non-English speaking countries, moving from memories of Holland to Wales, to a final section which looks outwards. The poet moves from being a stranger by nature of nationality and language, to a stranger in the world by reason of being human. The title reflects Hooker’s sense of not belonging. “I am a stranger in the area in which I live, and a stranger to the tragic history of the area. Being a stranger has affected my idea of myself as a poet (p.83).”²This awareness saves the poems from sentimentality and egotism. 

 

If we include 2016’s Ancestral Lines, then these four poetry books are what used to be called ‘a significant and important body of work,’ in their own right, because of the way they explore a maze of writing problems and offer one way out.

 

Hooker has quoted David Jones’ “one writes with the things at one’s disposal” which seems incontrovertible. However, biography is one of those things, and if biography is what makes writers who they are, then how do they write autobiographically without falling into the trap of producing something that is either private or, perhaps, worse, a lyric poem that begins and ends with the egotistical /I/? Hooker describes the problem: “I distrust the autobiographical impulse with its temptation to egotism and assumptions of finality. […] nostalgia came with a horror of being stuck in an idealised version of the past.” (‘A Note on Autobiographical Poetry’, Preludes p. 79).” 

 

The danger becomes more pressing for a man in his eighties, who has reached a time in his life when looking back seems inevitable. Ancestral Lines was Hooker’s direct confrontation with the problems of writing autobiographically. In ‘Lyric of Being’ the essay that ends that book, he wrote: “My concept of the poet was that of one who struggled to keep open a channel between self and the world and the living and the dead, as opposed to writing a verse beginning and ending with the self (Ancestral lines p.76).” 

 

In ‘Reflections on Two Welsh Words’, Hooker writes: “In tune with the thinking of modernists such as T.S. Eliot, David Jones, and George Oppen, I conceive of the poem as a made object, a thing that stands apart from the poet, an act in a transpersonal ‘conversation’ (p. 84).”

 

His poems have a conversational tone that only someone who is tone deaf would call artless. However, art as conversation means more than just tone. He has acknowledged his debt to Martin Buber’s I and Thou ³. According to Buber, the destructive tendency is to turn every ‘you’ into an ‘it,’ into something that can be instrumentalised, or used, or packaged – in poetic terms, to see oneself, like a Wordsworth, as the centre of the universe. The challenge, simplifying Buber, is to see and celebrate the other in all its specific otherness AND not lose the /I/ that is interacting with it. ⁴

 

In With a Stranger’s Eyes Hooker achieves a balance between the person writing and the subject of the writing. ‘Rowan Tree’ offers the most straightforward example. From Wales, or the Welsh poetic tradition, he took the idea of poetry as a vehicle for praise. ‘Rowan Tree’ is a song of praise but made new by the poet’s refusal to pretend the tree cares about him. 

 

It pleases me

that you are no thing

of words, but indifferent

to all I say or think.

 

Yet having contemplated the tree in all its seasonal and historical variations, the poem ends.

 

Rowan tree

that enchants my days

be to me, if only

in imagination, 

an old man’s staff.

Let me stand with you

against Atlantic gales.

Allow me to warm myself 

with your leaves’ red glow

against the coming cold.

 

To write about the tree is to acknowledge what the tree means to the writer. The difficulty is to see the subject not as an extension of self, but as something in relation to self. As he writes about people who were important to him, he preserves their essential strangeness while celebrating what they meant to him. 

 

But I will not insult the man

with elegy, or lessen his ferocity

with emollient words.

                        Let me see him

as the Jeremiah he was, 

                                    prophet

of the death we have dealt a nation,

and the doom we are bringing on our own.

                                                            ‘Gwenallt’

 

Living and working in Wales exacerbated the problem. Acutely conscious of his strangerhood, in a country whose language he didn’t master, Hooker was an unwilling representative of the race some of the Welsh writers he admired and championed saw justifiably as The Enemy. The pressure of this alterity may not be comfortable for the individual, but it is bracing for the poet. It acts against any tendency to ‘egotism and assumptions of finality.’ It makes nostalgia uncomfortable and reminds the poet of the difference between reality and any ‘idealised version of the past.’

 

The Welsh poetic tradition also began in commemoration. Hooker’s poems deal with places made memorable by the people he associates with them, or where tragedy happened. The poet commemorates by finding the image to bring events to the reader’s attention and understanding in ways that journalism cannot. In ‘Passing through Aberfan’, fourteen lines of understatement manage to capture the horror of an event that once reverberated through British culture. ‘On the Road to Senghenydd’ confronts the problem of writing about another, perhaps less well-known disaster.⁵

 

Do not imagine you can imagine it.

Do not suppose you know

what grief is, or terror, or courage

of men entering an inferno 

to rescue their kind. Today 

you may think the scene medieval,

like a picture of hell.

But you will know nothing

unless you catch a distant echo

from the very ground, where

a father calls for his son,

and a son cries for his father.

                                    ‘On the Road to Senghenydd’

 

Following Buber’s lead, the poems explore the rich variety of life. There is anger, and sadness, and humour. ‘Haunted House’ begins as any rural ghost story:

 

Children called it

the haunted house.

It may have been because 

an angry man lived here.

 

But the swerve at the end is both unexpected and highly effective. Made more so by the gentle ghost of Tennyson in the last line suggesting the rest of the quote.⁶

 

Whatever it was, I do not know

why children passed this house

with a tremor of fear.

What I do know are days and nights

when I would have given my life

to feel the touch of a ghostly hand. 

 

It’s easy to confuse ‘serious’ with humourless, but in Hooker’s case that would be a mistake. To be human the poems have to smile occasionally. 

 

But the artist’s soul was in it.

It wasn’t his fault

that he was a Victorian.  

                        ‘On the Painting called Peace’.

 

One of the ways out of the problem of the ego, is the figure of the man at the window.[i] Looking outwards has been a common theme in Hooker’s recent books. Poems frame a space for thinking through and in language, inviting the reader to look and think again. As he writes in ‘David Jones at Capel-y-ffin’,

 

                        And yes, it is true
the universal is revealed
through the particular thing.

 

Seagulls have been the subject of several memorable Hooker poems. 

 

Gull, gull,

lover of sea

and rubbish dump

devotee of plough

 

take me with you,

the observer asks,

                        let me share

a world that is alive, 

where sea roughens

with flying spume

under the west wind.

                        ‘Man at a window: six observations.’

 

If you live on the coast no poem can make you see seagulls ‘for the first time’. But a poem can colour the way you see them, so the irritating cacophonous chip scavengers will never be the same again.

 

‘Man at a Window: six observations’ ends the book. The sixth poem offers an image that might stand for Hooker and his most recent work. The Man at the Window is alone, separated from what he’s observing, but not trying to conscript what he sees to his own purposes, while celebrating what he sees and what it evokes for him.⁷ It begins:

 

One bright star

solitary, it seems 

in the whole night sky.

 

Not knowing the star’s name it reminds him of

 

[…] the young poet
who never died, but lives
steadfast,
for the holiness that is love.

 

You might miss the allusions to Keats, you might think the ‘young poet’ is the poet’s younger self, it could well be, but it’s hard to miss the affirmation of one possible role of poetry. The passage quoted earlier about T.S. Eliot, David Jones and George Oppen continues. “I differ in emphasising its nature as an emotional process. I have finally come to recognize that I am primarily a lyric poem and a love poet.”

 

Love is a dangerously imprecise word. I’d suggest that for Hooker, ‘love’ is not just the confusion that drives adolescents to attempt poetry but a mature working through of Buber’s ideas about the possibilities of human relationships, and how the self relates to the world in all its variety of people, writings, history and places. ‘Love poetry’ describes an open-ended conversation, grounded in what Keats called “the holiness of the Heart’s affections.”⁸

 

Footnotes

 

[1] Word and Stone (2019) and Preludes (2024). In the last five years Hooker has also published a book of essays, and three books of mixed poetry and prose in a genre he has made his own: The Art of Seeing (2020), The Release (2022), Addiction, a Love story (2024) and Presence and Place (2025). All  of them have been published by Shearsman. To do it justice, With a Stranger’s Eyes, should be considered in the context of this group of later work, reaching back to include 2016’s Ancestral Lines. But that requires more words than an essay offers.  

2 Unless otherwise stated quotations and page numbers refer to With a Stranger’s Eyes.

3 Martin Buber (1878-1965) published Ich und Du in 1923, published in English in 1937 as I and Thou – a meditation on human relationships, and a critique of objectification and over-abstraction.

4 ‘Simplifying’ here is an extravagant understatement.

5 In 1913 an explosion at the pit head killed 439 men and boys. It was the worst mining disaster in British history.

6 ‘But O for the touch of a vanish'd hand/and the sound of a voice that is still’  From Break Break Break.

7 I’ve written about the man at the window in the context of The Release. https://ladygodivaandme.blogspot.com/2022/02/jeremy-hookers-release-part-three-poems.html 

8 John Keats, in a letter to Benjamin Bailey dated 22 November 1817.

 

 

 

 

William the Marshal, or, the Joys of Research.

 William the Marshal, realising that the French King has no interest in Peace:

'Good Sir, I'd appreciate it if you'd explain one thing: in France it's the custom for traitors to be treated like scum-burnt at the stake or pulled apart by horses! But now they're part of the establishment; they're all lords and masters!'

'That's fair enough,' the king replied. 'It's all a question of business now-and they're like shit-rags; once you've done your business, you chuck them down the privy.'

The History of William the Marshal, translated by Nigel Bryant. 

Not much has changed.

Second thought.

The History has to be one of the most enjoyable and 'readable' of early Thirteenth Century texts, all the more so since its central character was both 'Europe's Greatest Knight' and by the end of his life a major figure in the politics of the period.  Interesting too, given that it's such a good story, full of incidents and drama, and that the man himself is a fascinating conundrum, that no one has ever turned the Marshal's life into a film. Though if it were filmed, they'd probably ruin it, so perhaps it's for the best.