Romancing Miss Bronte (53 page)

Arthur lived on in the parsonage, tending Charlotte’s aging father and taking the parish duties, sterling true to his word.

They were an odd pair—bound by grief and love, by a fate too painful to share with anyone but each other—the eccentric old father who had lost most of his sight and his hearing and the bereaved husband who had buried his heart.

With the death of the last of the Brontës, the sisters’ fame only grew. Requests for Charlotte’s handwriting came in from all over the world, and Patrick cut some of her precious letters into tiny strips and sent them off to satisfy the demand. He was careful not to let Arthur know when he did this sort of thing. Arthur abhorred curiosity seekers and he understood—better than Patrick—that these mementos might be collected for material gain. Arthur was incensed at the idea that strangers might enrich themselves from the effects of his self-denying wife who had lived most of her life in poverty, and he guarded Charlotte’s few material possessions, as well as all her siblings’ writings, as carefully as if they were the relics of a saint.

When George Smith sent a letter proposing that Elizabeth Gaskell write Charlotte’s biography, Arthur reluctantly conceded, only because Patrick wished it so. Upon her visit to the parsonage, Lily found the interview with the two bereaved men so painful that she spent but a few hours with them and then hurried away, never to return. Charlotte’s friends would have to provide the bulk of the material she needed. Mary Taylor wrote from New Zealand that, as per Charlotte’s request, she
had conscientiously destroyed her letters. Ellen had not been so faithful; she had hoarded nearly every piece of paper to which Charlotte had set her name and now eagerly supplied the treasure trove of correspondence that enabled Lily to write her book.

Ellen’s betrayal left Arthur reeling, for some letters of a very private nature made it into Lily’s book—most notably, those in which Arthur was portrayed as a morose and lovesick sniveler, and the local press picked up those parts and reprinted them, to Arthur’s keen humiliation. Patrick—of whom Lily had formed some very harsh opinions, based on her own notions of Charlotte’s odd upbringing—fared no better. The men dealt with these injustices in their own way. Patrick took his ogre-like portrayal with good humor; Arthur, who felt he had been dragged into sanctioning something that was utterly repugnant, read the Gaskell biography with inexpressible pain but remained silent about it all.

It was to Lily’s credit that he never learned about Charlotte’s letters to Constantin Heger. Suspecting there was a good deal of Charlotte’s story to be discovered in Brussels, she traveled all the way to the Continent to meet the professor. His wife refused to see her, but Monsieur Heger received her warmly. He still had in his possession several of Charlotte’s letters, which he showed her—passionate, heart-wrenching letters of unrequited love couched in the language of an adoring pupil writing to her master. Here was confirmation of a suspicion none of them had ever dared to voice: that Charlotte, much like Jane Eyre, had fled the temptation of an adulterous love. In her biography, Lily treated the Brussels episode of Charlotte’s life shrewdly, with great caution, and Charlotte’s letters to Constantin Heger would not surface until well into the following century.

Neither husband nor father took a penny from the publication of the biography. Monetary gain was never a question for them; they only wished to rectify some of the cruel misrepresentations about the woman they had both loved. Lily was paid handsomely—twice what Charlotte had received for her last novel—and Charlotte Brontë’s biography would prove to be her most enduring work.

When George expressed an interest in publishing
The Professor
—
which he had resolutely refused to publish in Charlotte’s lifetime—Arthur and Patrick rejected the idea on the grounds that the same story had been successfully told in
Villette
. But forces conspired against them, and Sir James swept down on the parsonage one day and in his determined, insensitive manner managed to wrest the manuscript from Arthur’s hands.

Arthur was shrewder when it came to
Emma
, which he felt had merits, even as a fragment. The manuscript was particularly precious to him because it was the last thing his wife had written, and he spent hours laboriously transcribing the heavily revised pages rather than lend out the original.
Emma
first appeared in George Smith’s new publication, the
Cornhill Magazine
, along with a glowing personal tribute to Charlotte written by William Makepeace Thackeray.

Conscientious to the end, ever mindful of his wife’s personal integrity, when George clamored for more poetry, Arthur read through Emily and Charlotte’s verse, and with Patrick’s assistance selected only the ones he deemed Charlotte would value. Then he sat down and carefully copied them. It was an excruciatingly painful task, and when the Bells’ poetry was republished several years later, no reader would have thought to imagine that the volumes had been produced through the fog of tears.

George would forever benefit from his association with the Brontës; he would live into the next century and die an exceedingly wealthy man.

Patrick and Arthur lived on together quietly, tended by the ever-faithful Martha. Not long after Charlotte’s death, the two men acquired a new dog from the Haworth schoolmaster—a young Newfoundland that Charlotte had doted on as a pup—and named him Plato. Patrick, a man of deep, unshakable faith, never questioned God’s great wisdom, but it was a bitter cup to drink, to outlive his wife and all six children and then linger on for six long years. In his Sunday sermons he was known for quoting Job, and sometimes from the pulpit he would speak softly of longing for wings like a dove to fly away from the wearisome world and be at rest. There were some in the village who were of the opinion that his wife’s
death had worked a little good in Arthur. He showed more tolerance for the failings of his flock, and what he once perceived as insults to the church of God he now saw simply as human weakness or ignorance. When he noticed that Mrs. Barraclough’s knees were getting so bad that it took her half the Lord’s Prayer to kneel, he pulled her aside after the service and told her that the Lord wouldn’t find her any less pious if she remained in her seat from now on. Farmer Butterfield said he’d come across Arthur in a field one day with Plato in tow and a little lad balanced on the dog’s back. Arthur had found the boy asleep beside the footpath, exhausted from a day of work in the mill, and had scooped him up and set him on the dog’s back; the boy rode the young dog all the way home.

When Patrick died, it was presumed that Arthur would be offered the position that he had single-handedly administered all these years. But there was agitation for change. The church trustees wanted a new man, one with an independent income and the means to restore the crumbling parsonage. One free of bothersome ties to the infamous Brontës and with a little more tolerance for the dissenting sects that were now so numerous in the village. It was by a margin of one vote that Arthur found himself, just months after burying Patrick, without a curacy.

This was a crushing blow to Arthur, and many in the village thought it shabby and heartless to abandon the man after he’d labored so long and lost so much, leaving him with no employment and nowhere to go. They were ashamed of themselves, and no one could pass Arthur in the street and dare to look him in the eye.

Martha thought it was just as well. Arthur was such a lonely and disconsolate man, with his beloved wife and all her family now sealed in a cold vault beneath the stone church floor. With Martha’s help he packed Charlotte’s dresses, her writing desk, sewing box and paint box, the manuscripts and the little books she had written as a child, her portrait by Richmond as well as all the other family portraits, and the grandfather clock that had stood on the stair landing. Of what remained of the family’s
personal belongings, Martha took her pick, and the rest went up for auction.

He left Haworth before dawn one September day, taking with him his treasured possessions and Patrick’s dog. He never sought another curacy but returned to Ireland and took up farming, slipping into a life of quiet obscurity. After a while, Martha—who had once professed such a violent dislike for the curate—came to live with him in Banagher, bringing her colorful Yorkshire manners and recipes for her tea cakes and, above all, her memories. She was as devoted to Arthur as she had been to his wife and until her death served him loyally.

For years after the publication of Lily Gaskell’s biography a good deal of controversy flew around involving libel suits and rights; there were page after page of letters rebutting claims made in the book, quarrels about what was true and what was not; Ellen, who had expected praise and recognition for her contribution, found herself under attack for recklessly divulging Charlotte’s personal correspondence. Bitter and bristling with indignation, she attempted to deflect the blame onto Arthur, against whom she would nurse a grudge for life. But Arthur remained distanced from the scandals and the Brontë fanatics. Conscientious to the end, always mindful of his wife’s integrity, he did what was asked of him and ignored much of what was written about his famous wife and her family.

Ten years later he married his cousin Mary Anna, but it was widely accepted that Arthur acted out of gratitude to Mary Anna, who had kept his house and been such a caring companion all those years; they retained their separate bedrooms, and there were never any children. Charlotte still lived on in his heart; the portraits that had once hung in the parsonage and many of the Brontës’ watercolors now crowded the walls of his modest house; the grandfather clock that Patrick Brontë had punctually wound every night at nine stood on the stairs, and Charlotte’s white wedding dress and bonnet were carefully preserved in a clothespress. The dress was in Martha’s keeping, and every few months she’d take it out and give it a good airing.

Arthur lived long, nearly to ninety, largely forgotten by the outside world. The few people who made the effort to locate him found him to be a dignified, contented man, idolized by his wife and held in great esteem by his friends and neighbors.

He bequeathed Charlotte’s wedding dress to his brother Joseph’s daughter, Miss Charlotte Brontë Nicholls, with instructions that the dress should be burned before she died so that it would not be sold.

Miss Charlotte Brontë Nicholls kept her word.

Thousands of readers, writers, and scholars have fallen under the Brontës’ spell, as I first did during a graduate seminar over fifteen years ago. Countless plays, novels, and films have been spun from their lives and their work. But what I found so gripping was the true story of Charlotte’s personal struggle: her determination to overcome circumstance, even her own temperament and nature, in order to taste just a few of life’s splendors, its thrills and its beauty.

From the beginning I was committed to as much historical accuracy as the narrative could bear; it was tempting to omit some of the characters who impacted her life, or tighten the progression of her relationship with George Smith, but it would have meant sacrificing a deeper and more complex portrayal. Likewise, the political and social problems of their time needed to be addressed. Arthur’s religious intolerance presented an enormous hurdle to Charlotte personally, and the historical context of their differences needed to be woven into the story.

Nearly all of Charlotte’s letters are her own, with minor editing and only occasional invention. Her letters also provided the substance, if not the language, for some of the dialogue. I also turned to her novels for character development, particularly
Shirley
, where I felt she was speaking through her characters of her sisters and their relationship with their father. After countless readings of all the sisters’s works and letters concurrently with biographies and historical documents of the region and the period, I felt confident making those choices.

As a novelist I drew on what may have been minor incidents or anecdotes
to develop the story, some of which were alluded to in biographers’ footnotes, or could be inferred by reading between the lines of correspondence. Necessarily, there was a certain compression of events at the beginning, but even the time frame of their lives during these years is, for the most part, accurate.

A few of the minor characters, such as Miss Dixon, are pure invention.

Arthur Nicholls is an obscure figure about who very little is known, although Charlotte certainly wrote a good deal about him during the difficult months after his proposal. Even then, the portrait she painted of him was skewed by her own prejudices, and later, when that attitude had been transformed by love, she said little about their intimate lives. Thus it was this part of the story that allowed my imagination the most freedom—although I do not hesitate to add that the progression of their romance accurately follows Charlotte’s account, and nearly all the scenes toward the end are rooted in authentic incidents, particularly the events that led her to view him in a new light and fall in love with him. Arthur’s letters to Charlotte are my own creation, and I suspect, given his deep feelings, I have not fallen far from the mark. Intentionally, his outpourings draw from the same language she used in her letters to Heger. I took enormous pleasure in bringing Arthur to life and giving him his due in the story.

This novel would not have been possible twenty-five years ago; it stands on the shoulders—I should say in the shadows—of remarkable scholarly achievements. I am particularly indebted to Juliet Barker’s extensive work,
The Brontës
, which brought to light difficult-to-access sources such as George Richmond’s papers and George Smith’s autobiography, and to Margaret Smith’s monumental three-volume edition of all Charlotte’s surviving letters. I would also enthusiastically recommend
The Brontës: Charlotte Brontë and Her Family
by Rebecca Fraser, recently reissued as
Charlotte Brontë: A Writer’s Life; Charlotte Brontë: The Self Conceived
by Helene Moglen; and
The Life of Charlotte Brontë
by Elizabeth Gaskell. It is my sincere hope that my novel will inspire the reader to pick up one of these fascinating studies. And, of course, the Brontës’ novels as well.