a gallimaufry

Take Courage: Anne Brontë and the Art of Life, by Samantha Ellis

A little while ago I started reading Juliet Barker’s The Brontës; in fact I even decided to write about it on here as I read it. Unfortunately, like so many Parry projects, it fell by the wayside. There were two causes for this failure: one was that the Barker book was just too big and heavy to bring on the bus with me, which meant that I had ‘bus reading’ and the Barker, and I can’t really cope with reading more than one book at once so in the end the bus reading conquered the Barker. And then Brexit happened and I was too absorbed in politics – and then suddenly months had passed and I’d lost the momentum. But of course, I felt guilty about it.

However, bus reading or no bus reading I am inspired to pick it up again and this is entirely due to Samantha Ellis’s Take Courage, which is a sort-of biography of Anne Brontë. According to Ellis, Anne is the neglected, forgotten Brontë, usually considered – when considered at all – as mouselike and pious – boring, really. (And I would certainly agree that when people think about the Brontës, they think first and foremost of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights.) Ellis herself had always been an Emily devotee, though she also admired Charlotte’s ‘toughness and spirit’. However, on a visit to the Parsonage in Haworth, Ellis reads Anne’s last letter:

‘I long to do some good in the world ... before I leave it. I have many schemes in my head for future practise – humble and limited indeed – but still I should not like them all to come to nothing, and myself to have lived to so little purpose.’ This catches at my heart, and makes me breathe hard suddenly. I put the letter down. This Anne knew what she wanted. She had published two novels and many poems. She didn’t want to have to stop. She was courageous, she was tough, and she wanted more life.

Ellis is transfixed; she connects to Anne emotionally, and begins to suspect that what she had believed about Anne was untrue. So begins her journey to find a more interesting Anne, someone who turns out to be feminist, radical and courageous – not unlike Ellis herself, in fact. Reading Anne’s novels, she realises that they were not only undervalued when they were first published, they are still undervalued now.

Ellis’s first problem is that so little of what Anne wrote remains: two novels, some poems (though many have disappeared), five letters, four diary papers, two of which were co-written with Emily (they had a habit of writing a diary paper every four years, giving an update of their lives; they wrote them together if they could or separately if they were apart) and some marginalia in a few books. Otherwise she has to rely on what others wrote about Anne, and those of Anne’s possessions that still survive. Her solution is clever: she devotes each chapter of her book to one of the people closest to Anne – including the heroines of her two novels – ending with Anne herself. Each person ‘represents’ an aspect of Anne herself – so Maria, her mother, contains her origin story, her attitude towards motherhood and marriage; Tabby, the elderly servant, contains her love of the moors and nature. This approach reminded me of Jacob’s Room, by Virginia Woolf, which creates a frame around the central character by which we learn to know him. I thought this worked really well.

(Sketch of Anne by Charlotte Brontë, ca 1834; found here)

Ellis also eschews any attempt at objectivity or impartiality. This book is driven by her enthusiasm and liking for Anne, which gives it an enormous amount of energy and personality. She speculates fearlessly and, one can’t help feeling, perceptively, on how Anne might have felt or reacted to various situations (‘Anne must have...’ pops up frequently). She tells us about her own life as she researches Anne up in Haworth, visits the places associated with her life, contemplates her own life and new relationship, and she tells us too about her reactions to the material she reads about Anne’s life:

her optimism makes me sigh. I don’t want Anne to be the good girl diligently slogging away. It seems more fun to be Charlotte and Branwell, raging and sneering at their bosses, or Emily, hating employment so much that she mostly avoided it. I don’t want Anne to be excited about setting off for her first job in April 1839 when, at the time, all her siblings were at home and writing like the wind.

In doing this, Ellis takes some risks. One is that she mines Anne’s creative writing, especially her poetry, for Anne’s own opinions. Are her poems on her religious doubts, for instance, really expressions of her own struggles with faith? Might they not be partly or even entirely manipulated by Anne’s artistic skills to create certain effects? To give a doubting reader hope, for instance, rather than articulate her own fears? Or a mixture of both? She extends this to the writings of others: she implicitly suggests that the sisters Rose and Jessy Yorke in Shirley, for instance, are Charlotte and Anne – or how Charlotte perceived their relationship – based on no evidence I could see. I felt that Ellis might be right, but she might not be; I think the role of the imagination in shaping and transmuting biographical facts should never be underestimated and this made me uncomfortable sometimes.

Another risk is that Ellis’s partisanship for Anne, while cheering and necessary, colours her judgement and, for one thing, leads her to resent Charlotte. As I wrote above, I haven’t yet finished the Barker biography so I probably shouldn’t be commenting on this, and from what I have read Charlotte does seem to have been quite a difficult person. However, Ellis does seem to put the worst interpretation on everything Charlotte does. For instance, Ellis believes that Charlotte suppressed Anne’s writing, but perhaps she was trying to protect her reputation (or doing a bit of both?); and it is just possible that in deciding to hold Anne’s funeral without her father, she was right and expecting Patrick to come and bury yet another child would have been too painful to him. It seems to be, in the world of the Brontës, that if you champion one you have to decry the others and that you can only be either/or about them. Ellis first goes to Haworth, after all, to promote her previous book, which pitched Wuthering Heights against Jane Eyre.

Yet taking risks like these creates a lively and affectionate read, through which I zipped in marked contrast to my attempts on Barker’s monumental, scrupulous, scholarly work, and the nice thing about the literary world is that we can enjoy both books and their different strengths. For Ellis’s analysis of Anne’s literary works, especially her novels, is brilliant and rightly reveals their daring, their radicalness and their ‘realness’. In Agnes Grey Anne lifted the lid on life as a governess, showing the ugly reality in which even ‘proper gentry’ behaved badly (this piece of news seems to have shocked the gentry). She also crafted a romance between a man and a woman which was both realistic and based on mutual respect (no glowering Byronic heroes here). The Tenant of Wildfell Hall not only went beyond the ‘marriage plot’ (in which a novel is concerned only with the story leading up to the wedding), it looked unflinchingly and scandalously on alcoholism and a husband’s abuse of his marital rights – and it gives us a feminist heroine who fights for her and her son’s future.

(The dining-room at Haworth Parsonage with – I think – Anne’s writing desk on the table; photograph found here)

AND did you know? because I did not – unless you are reading an edition of Tenant which is based on Stevie Davies’ 1996 edition – or a first or second edition (lucky you) – then you are almost certainly reading a butchered text. !!! Most modern editions are based on a rackety edition published in 1854, years after Anne’s death. The publisher, Thomas Hodgson, wanted to issue the book cheaply, so hacked bits out to make the book fit one volume. This version has become the one most frequently reprinted ever since. Ellis lays a ‘mutilated’ edition beside the Davies edition and is shocked at the difference. Some removals seem to have been purely to cut the page count; others to subtly reduce the radicalness of the original. When I read this I jumped right out of bed and ran to my bookcase to check my own copy: yes, I do have the framing story, but other parts, including Anne’s preface, have been removed. Horrors! I’ll have to buy another book! And I’ll have to buy Agnes Grey, because I’ve never read it. Oh dear. What a painful duty.

In short: if you don’t know much about the Brontës, this strikes me as a great place to start. If you already do know a lot about the Brontës, you will enjoy revisting them in the company of a clever and opinionated friend.

Disclaimer: Samantha Ellis generously donated this book as part of a bundle of her work to be auctioned in the Authors for Grenfell fundraiser; and when I won it she inscribed all the books for me. Of course I only bid on her bundle because I like her work anyway, but it’s always nice to know that an author is a kind person ...

The Brontës, by Juliet Barker, part two

At the end of my previous post about the family, Patrick Brontë had failed to find a second wife for himself and stepmother for his six children. This meant falling back onto Plan B: school. On the recommendation of a couple of family friends, the two eldest daughters, Maria and Elizabeth, aged just nine and eight, were sent off to Crofton Hall. Unfortunately, it was expensive, and Patrick had other children to educate…  

(Undated etching of Cowan Bridge, found here)

A new ‘School for Clergymen’s Daughters’ was being opened at Cowan Bridge and seemed an answer to Patrick’s prayer: the fees were half those of comparable schools and its list of patrons included some of the most eminent people in the land. So Patrick escorted Maria and Elizabeth there on 21 July 1824; three weeks later, he brought Charlotte, and in November, Emily, who was only six. By December, poor little Maria was showing signs of consumption but the school did not inform her family; it wasn’t until the middle of February, when she was seriously ill, that the school wrote to Patrick. He came immediately and took her home, where she died in May. Even as the family was nursing Maria, Elizabeth was falling ill with consumption too. There was an outbreak of typhus at the school and on doctor’s advice the girls were sent to the seaside – except for Elizabeth. She was sent back to Haworth in the company of a servant.

Patrick travelled to Silverdale the very next day to bring Emily and Charlotte home, and they never went back to Cowan Bridge. Elizabeth died in June. The remaining children were of course deeply traumatised by what had happened. It was particularly hard, Juliet Barker writes, that Maria and Elizabeth were the eldest; they were the ones who had led, whom the others had looked up to. Motherless children and orphans became a fixture of the remaining sisters’ writing.

Juliet Barker argues that Cowan Bridge was no worse than most schools of its time and in fact better than many. Children and adults were susceptible to fatal diseases the causes of which were not always understood; pupils dying at school was therefore a depressingly common phenomenon and Cowan Bridge’s record was not too bad. Still, the argument that ‘other schools were worse’ in terms of health and punishment is hardly an exoneration of Cowan Bridge. There’s no question that the food was unpleasant, unhygienically prepared and inadequate. The dirty kitchen was responsible for the outbreak of typhus. The girls were cold in winter and, most damningly, expected to wear thin shoes and pattens on their walks. This frequently resulted in wet feet, an invitation to illness –especially consumption. While Charlotte’s depiction of Lowood in Jane Eyre was fictional and based on a small girl’s perspective, particularly alive to cruelty and injustice, it was accurate enough for many former pupils to recognise its original as Cowan Bridge and distressing enough for readers of the time to be horrified by it; its regime may have been the norm but that didn’t make it acceptable to everyone in the nineteenth century.

(One of the little books by Charlotte, from here, where there are lots of nice images of the little books)

Back at Haworth the years passed, the pain grew bearable. The children read voraciously; in addition to their books at home they had access to the circulating libraries in Keighley and copies of Blackwood’s Magazine which they borrowed from a neighbour. Blackwood’s, with its Tory politics, satire and reviews of new works of biography, history, travel and fiction, had a profound influence on the siblings’ writings. Sadly, Emily’s and Anne’s early writings have not survived, but many of Branwell’s and Charlotte’s tiny books still exist. Juliet Barker writes very interestingly about the Gothicky stories of Glasstown and Angria, and the way in which they often formed a sort of artistic conversation between Charlotte and Branwell, a game they enjoyed playing with each other. In the stories they mock their sisters and each other and attack each other’s favourite characters. Barker claims that previous biographers have used Charlotte and Branwell’s cheerfully prolific references to drunkenness to argue that Branwell was already boozing (at the age of thirteen!) – but they don’t argue the same of Charlotte, an interesting double standard.

But the spectre of school and of a governessy future never entirely receded and when Charlotte was fourteen she was sent off to Roe Head School (a considerable improvement on Cowan Bridge which I feel slightly undermines Barker’s earlier position that Cowan Bridge was sort of all right really). Although it was tough for Charlotte, especially at first, she made friends – two were lifelong – and entertained her fellows by telling them stories – a sort of creative lifeline for her, too, away from Branwell and the little books. She also excelled academically. Later she was to return to teach, a less happy experience. Emily and Anne were also sent to Roe Head in due course but Emily only lasted three months before falling ill and being sent home. Barker speculates that while all the sisters found school difficult, Anne and Charlotte had a much stronger sense of duty and obligation than Emily, who simply could not and would not abide the restrictions.

(Drawing of Roe Head school by Anne Brontë, c. 1835–37; found here)

It’s hard not to feel angry on Charlotte and Anne’s behalfs, and not just because there were so few avenues available to them as middle-class women who must earn their livings so they were forced into something that made them miserable. Patrick dissuaded Charlotte from considering a writing career as being too uncertain. This was no doubt true, yet while Charlotte was gritting her teeth teaching French etc. to mischievous girls at Roe Head, Branwell was faffing about at home – shall I become an artist or a writer? Artist? Writer? – and writing hilariously entitled letters to the editor of Blackwood’s insisting that he read Branwell’s work and hire him at once as the next James Hogg. Patrick’s indulgence of this seems doubly odd as everyone seems to have agreed that Branwell was a totally crap painter. And while I’m on the subject, Branwell doesn’t seem at any point to have been sent off to school. So at this stage of the biography, the Brontë men are rather taxing my patience despite Juliet Barker’s even-handedness.

The Brontës, by Juliet Barker, part one

It was only when I started seeing reviews of Claire Harman’s new biography of her, that I realised that 2016 was a Significant Year: the bicentenary of Charlotte Brontë’s birth. Stefanie’s and Jenny’s brilliant reviews made me wild to read about this extremely talented and erm slightly unusual family, and I knew I had a copy of Margaret Lane’s biography… but who knows where that is? It may be at my parents’ house, but even though that poor book has lain unread for ten years on a shelf or perhaps even in a box, suddenly I could not wait even a couple of months until I next visited them. I needed Brontës right now! And although the Harman biography looked very good, I decided to succumb entirely to Brontëmania and ordered a copy of Juliet Barker’s biography of the whole family, described as ‘definitive’.

Definitive it may very well be, but it is also enormous. Huge! Bigger than my Collected Shakespeare! When the postman arrived, we had to remove the front door simply to get the book in the house! I can only read it if K kneels before me holding it up and open, as a human lectern! And it’s so heavy he weeps all the time he’s holding it! Progress through such a large book is thus necessarily slow and, the Parry brains being no longer what they could be, I feared that I might forget the beginning before I reached the end. Then I thought: I’ll write about it as I go along!

Before I started, I believed I knew a few things about the Bs:

1. Patrick Brontë, the papa, was a mean old tyrant.
2. Branwell, the brother, was a useless drunkard. And his paintings were crap!
3. The children lived an isolated and friendless life, with only the moors, their imaginations and assorted dogs called Gnasher and Psycho for companions.
4. Everyone (except Papa) died of consumption, either due to the horrible cruel school where the girls were sent by their mean old papa, or due to the poisonous fumes of the churchyard by their house, I don’t really know which but it was definitely grim and Victorian.

Already, it seems that I may not have been correct about all of these...

(Photograph of Patrick Brontë around 1860; found here)

The biography starts off with several chapters concerning Patrick’s life before becoming a father. I admit that I was impatient to get onto some wailing and moorland, but this section is both useful for understanding the children’s domestic environment and important because it gives us a more rounded figure of Patrick than the mean old git of popular legend. Born in Ireland of farming stock, Patrick managed to secure himself a place at St John’s, Cambridge: he was clearly very intellectually able but without an immense amount of hard work and determination he would never have succeeded. At university, surrounded by the sons of the richest families in Britain, he struggled to make ends meet yet was almost always top of his class. He also managed to make some useful friends who helped him to his first job as a curate in the Essex village of Wethersfield. Here he had a fairly easy life and contracted an engagement with Mary Burder. Precisely what happened next is unclear, but it seems that Mary’s uncle – her father was dead, but the family was reasonably well-off – took a dim view of Patrick’s future prospects and Irishness. He forbad the marriage and whisked Mary away from Wethersfield to his house. Embarrassed by this and convinced that God had acted through the uncle (Mary was a Nonconformist and marrying her was a bit problematic for Patrick’s conscience and career), Patrick gave her up, found another job and moved away; Mary continued to hope for some years after. Eventually, bitterly hurt, she realised that their engagement would never be renewed and believed she had been jilted.

Not so much is known about Patrick’s wife, Maria Branwell, whom he met when she was helping her aunt with the domestic side of running a school, Woodhouse Grove, and married in 1812. She had grown up in Penzance in middle-class comfort and a whirl of social activity until her father died when she was twenty-five (her mother died a year later). Her letters seem to suggest she was more playful and perhaps light-hearted than Patrick. What would life have been like for our future authors and their siblings had she survived? For after bearing six children in as many years, she contracted what was probably cancer of the uterus and died; her suffering lasted a harrowing seven and a half months.

(Maria Branwell, artist unknown, at around the age of 15 according to the internets; found here)

Maria’s great concern seems to have been for the future of her children, and it must have been heartbreaking for her to know she would never see them grow and that they would be marked by her loss. But her death brought another problem. She left five daughters and, despite all Patrick’s hard work, it was clear that none of them would be independently wealthy through him. If they failed to marry, they would have to earn their own livings. In the early nineteenth century, pretty much the only respectable form of employment for an unmarried middle-class woman was teaching, either as a governess or in a school. Without a mother, however, the Brontë girls would fail to acquire the education necessary for such employment – unless they went to school. And school cost money and Patrick did not have much money.

In the two years following Maria’s death, therefore, Patrick desperately sought a second wife. Did he realise that a man of limited means with six small children whose wife had only recently died was perhaps not the most attractive prospect as a husband? He seems to have proposed or tried to propose to three women and managed to do so in a way that left them no longer on speaking terms with him. One of these women was none other than poor Mary Burder. Patrick seems genuinely surprised that she might have been wounded by his behaviour a dozen or so years previously.

So far, Juliet Barker has been rather at pains to rehabilitate Patrick Brontë from the damning portrait painted by Elizabeth Gaskell and sometimes perhaps bends a bit too far the other way. That drive which served him so well in his career may have rendered him rather blinkered when it came to others’ sensitivities. He also had a lot of calls on his time which surely would have kept him from spending a lot of time with his children – although in Victorian England, that was not remotely unusual. Discharging the pistol which you slept with from the back of the house every morning was, on the other hand, definitely unusual however you try to gloss it.

Next time: horrible school and juvenilia.