Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (26 page)

I sought, and soon discovered, the three headstones on the slope next the moor: the middle one grey, and half buried in heath; Edgar Linton’s only harmonized by the turf and moss creeping up its foot; Heathcliff’s still bare.

I lingered round them, under that benign sky: watched the moths fluttering
among the heath and harebells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass, and wondered how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.

No last day trumpet, it seems, will come to wake them. There was now the necessity for the sisters to
do
something with their lives. In the absence of some other man, they could expect no financial support after the death of their curate father (ironically, though, he was destined to outlive them). Oddly, none of the Brontë girls – although handsome, as Branwell’s portraits attest, and gifted, as their writing attests – seemed able, or willing, to enter marriage, despite what must have been an ample supply of eligible young clergymen in their circle.

In 1838 Emily became a teacher governess at a school near Halifax, Law Hill, and in 1839 Anne and Charlotte went as governesses to private families. Charlotte’s first two positions were short and unhappy. Docile Anne was the least unhappy. She also left in fiction the most realistic account of how humiliating the work was for a well-bred, highly intelligent young woman, superior in every way to her employers. Anne’s first employment, aged eighteen, was with the Ingham family at Blake Hall, near Mirfield. The children were spoilt and malicious and she was dismissed after a year. It’s nice to think that the Inghams lived to read their nasty selves portrayed as the odious Bloomfields, in
Agnes Grey
. ‘Gentle’ and ‘dutiful’ as she may have been, Anne does not gild the governess’s life with Jane Eyreish romanticism. She is more of Jane Fairfax’s party (in
Emma
) that it is the domestic English slave trade. Particularly stomach-turning is the depiction of young Tom Bloomfield torturing (‘fettling’) birds. When Agnes remonstrates, she is blandly informed that she is a servant and should mind her own business – ‘by gum!’

The sisters did not intend to governess for the rest of their lives. They made various unsuccessful attempts to publish their writing and had a plan, with the financial assistance of an aunt, to establish a school of their own (a dream which finds recurrent expression in Charlotte’s later fiction). With a view to preparing themselves, Charlotte and Emily went to Brussels in 1842 to study and teach at a boarding school. Charlotte, then twenty-six, fell hopelessly in love with the proprietor and head of the school, M. Constantin Héger, whom she later portrayed as the exemplarily correct, and morally admirable, Paul Emanuel in
Villette
. Her depiction of Mme Héger is less warm. The sisters returned to Haworth in 1842 and only Charlotte went back to Brussels for a second year at the Pensionnat Héger. Emily, the more poetically inclined sister, was most rooted to Haworth and Yorkshire and seems to have hated leaving it. For Charlotte, the Belgian experience was extraordinarily stimulating emotionally and intellectually, although clearly (as refracted through
Villette
’s Lucy Snowe) she disliked Brussels, despised Catholics, and suffered
horribly from her unrequited passion for her incorruptible professor – suffering distilled into Rochester’s cat and mouse game with his governess Jane.

In 1844 the school project fell through. It survives only as a forlorn fiction in the last paragraphs of
Villette
. At Charlotte’s initiative,
Poems
by ‘Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell’ (the androgynous names are significant) was published in 1846. It sold two copies, as legend has it. But it got worse. In 1847, Emily’s
Wuthering Heights
and Anne’s
Agnes Grey
were accepted by the notoriously dubious London publisher, Thomas Cautley Newby, who brought them out lumped together as an abysmally ugly three-volume set. The world took no notice. Charlotte’s
The Professor
(based on her Brussels experience, but with a stiltedly male hero) was turned down by the eminently respectable house of Smith, Elder and Co., but
Jane Eyre
was eagerly accepted and published in October 1847 to terrific success. The rogue Newby now published Anne’s
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
(1848) with the implication that it was actually the work of ‘Currer Bell’ – i.e. Charlotte, who in point of fact disliked her sister’s book for its graphic depiction of Branwell’s dipsomania. She suppressed its republication after Anne’s death.

Anne and Charlotte authenticated themselves by going to London to meet George Smith and other members of the literary world. Thackeray on this occasion met Charlotte whom he admired. She dedicated the second edition of
Jane Eyre
to him, sparking wild rumours that he was the original of Rochester (the only connection was that he, too, had an insane wife). This would be Anne’s only trip outside Yorkshire. Her life had been consistently drearier than those of her sisters who had, at least, seen foreign parts. After the horrors of the Inghams she had found a slightly more congenial governess post with the family of the Revd Edmund Robinson, near York.

At this point, in 1843, Anne’s career crossed, fatefully, with that of her brother. Branwell, having failed to get the hoped for place at university, went on to fail as a portrait painter. Even more catastrophic was his being dismissed from a clerical job with the local railway firm under the suspicion of embezzlement. Despite his known dissipations, Anne secured him a tutor’s position with her own employers, the Robinsons. Branwell was dismissed from that post for ‘proceedings … bad beyond expression’ – namely misconduct (vaguely specified) with Mrs Robinson. Mr Robinson threatened to shoot him. On his dismissal in 1845 he fell into a ‘spiral of despair’, which he medicated with opium and alcohol.

Branwell died, of drink, drugs and galloping consumption, in 1848, aged just thirty-one. The hopes of the family – and some incomplete works of fiction, alas – went to the grave with him in the family vault at Haworth. As his legacy, Branwell left, in his sisters’ writing, two of the most vivid depictions of chronic alcoholism
in Victorian literature. One is Hindley in
Wuthering Heights
; the other Arthur Huntingdon, in Anne’s
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
. Wildfell’s mysterious tenant, ‘Mrs Graham’, is, it emerges, a refugee from the alcoholic hell her husband Arthur has created. Descriptions of drunkenness are common enough in literature. What is most powerful in
The Tenant
is the close description of the alcoholic death. Helen, the abused wife, and Arthur are brought together in his final hours. Quite aware it will kill him, Arthur demands strong drink. The consequence is delirious terror:

‘Death is so terrible,’ he cried, ‘I cannot bear it! You don’t know, Helen – you can’t imagine what it is, because you haven’t it before you! and when I’m buried, you’ll return to your old ways and be as happy as ever, and all the world will go on just as busy and merry as if I had never been; while I –’ He burst into tears.

The novel was published three months before Branwell’s death. Anne may have hoped that plain-speaking, even through one of her characters, would effect a cure. It rarely does – as legions of wives of alcoholics testify. Anne survived her brother by only a few months, dying decently, but tragically early, of the family complaint. One imagines she met her end more dutifully. A few months earlier, consumption had also claimed Emily – who had resolutely refused medical attention. Charlotte noted the fact bitterly: ‘It is useless to question her; you get no answers. It is still more useless to recommend remedies; they are never adopted.’ Emily is the most enigmatic of the writing sisters. No clear image of her remarkable personality can be formed. Branwell sneered at her as ‘lean and scant’ aged sixteen. She, famously, counselled that he should be ‘whipped’ for his malefactions. She evidently thought well of the whip and used it, as Mrs Gaskell records, on her faithful hound, Keeper, when he dared to lie on her bed. A tawny beast with a ‘roar like a lion’, Keeper followed his mistress’s coffin to the grave and, for nights thereafter, moaned outside her bedroom door. A second novel, substantially written by Emily, has not survived, but the solitary achievement of
Wuthering Heights
adds to her mystique.

At thirty-five, Charlotte was the only child of the original six left alive. In 1849 she published
Shirley
, her ‘social problem’ novel, about the upheavals of the early Industrial Revolution, and the only one of her major works to be set in her native Yorkshire. This was followed, in 1853, by her most introspective work,
Villette
. The following year she married the Revd Arthur Bell Nicholls, her father’s curate since 1845. Though not loveless, how passionate the marriage was will never be known. She died of complications arising from pregnancy.

I must be informed that one of my great duties was to obey the priests in all things; and this I soon learnt, to my utter astonishment and horror, was to live in the practice of criminal intercourse with them.

There has been a successful campaign over the last half-century to identify, celebrate, and institutionalise an authentic ‘Canadian fiction’. One author – arguably the unluckiest novelist ever to write a bestseller – is signally absent from the roll of Maple Leaf honour. In 1836, the year that another young unknown, ‘Boz’, exploded on the scene with
The Pickwick Papers
, the North American reading public was entranced by
The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk as Exhibited in a Narrative of Her Sufferings During a Residence of Five Years as a Novice, and Two Years as a Black Nun, in the Hôtel Dieu Nunnery of Montreal
. First published in New York under the respectable Harper imprint, ‘Maria Monk’ went on to sell 300,000 in five years in pirate, ‘underground’ editions.

Purporting to be ‘true confessions’, the
Awful Disclosures
was as much a work of unalloyed fiction as anything Boz wrote. The nuns of Hôtel Dieu, it supposedly revealed, served as concubines for lecherous priests in a neighbouring seminary. These robed rogues indulged a Sadeian taste for flagellation and bondage (passages from the divine Marquis’s
Justine
are irresistibly evoked). Tunnels from neighbouring monasteries facilitated the priests’ nocturnal ravishing and the resulting bastards of Mother Church were murdered at birth, the little corpses being thrown in a lime pit, after being baptised, of course. Sex Vobiscum. Sex is everywhere under the veil, the robe, under the cardinal’s hat and even, it is hinted, under the papal vestments. Pope Gregory XVI, it was implied, had made anal rape a specific priestly duty. His Canadian clergy undertook the task with holy relish.

As the
Awful Disclosures
narrates it, Maria was a good little Canadian girl who – with the purest religious motives – took the veil, having converted in her teens from Protestantism to Catholicism. A horrible mistake. Only a couple of hours after taking her vows, Maria discovers the true nature of conventual devotions at Hôtel Dieu.

when, as I was sitting in the community-room, Father Dufresne called me out, saying, he wished to speak to me. I feared what was his intention; but I dared not disobey. In a private apartment, he treated me in a brutal manner; and, from two other priests, I afterwards received similar usage that evening. Father Dufresne afterwards appeared again; and I was compelled to remain in company with him until morning.

According to Monk, she was immured in this papal brothel for seven years, at which point, unable to face the idea of her newborn babe (engendered by the Abbé himself) going into the lime pit, she resourcefully made her escape. (It is, incidentally, impossible not to be reminded at such moments of Margaret Atwood’s
Handmaid’s Tale
.) The first edition of
The Awful Disclosures
finishes here but subsequent editions narrate Maria’s initial inclination to drown herself, having dutifully ensured the safety of her babe, and her later resolution to live and expose the evils of popery.

What little truth of Maria Monk’s life can be recovered is sad. Born Catholic in Montreal, she was, reportedly, brain-damaged at the age of seven when a pencil was jabbed deep into her ear. From earliest childhood, she was sexually wayward and turned, in her teens, to prostitution. She never set foot in Hôtel Dieu, a wholly respectable institution. Aged eighteen, Maria’s mother had her incarcerated in Montreal’s Charitable Institution for Female Penitents. Spectacularly impenitent, she got herself pregnant and was expelled, then made her way down to the United States.

In Boston, she witnessed virulent anti-Catholic riots and the burning of a convent. Riding this prejudice, she invented her fables about the Hôtel Dieu to explain her bastard child. It came to the notice of the press and she was written about in the New York newspapers in October 1835. By now she had embellished her fictions, claiming that, just before her lucky escape, she had been instructed to poison a fellow nun who had dared to resist the beastly sexual demands made on her. Overnight, Maria Monk (a happy name in the circumstances) was a Protestant ‘cause’, and living proof of Catholic licentiousness. The articles were followed up, a few months later, by
The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk
. The narrative was actually ghosted by George Bourne and John Jay Slocum, two virulently anti-Catholic Presbyterian ministers. They profited handsomely from the book, quarrelling with each other furiously over their spoils, but Monk got not a cent – or what pittance she got she squandered.