May 19, 2018 • 29 mins
We're revisiting another episode from Sarah and Deblina., in which they talk about how the Brontë sisters quickly rose from obscurity to notoriety after their three novels were published under the Bell pseudonym.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Hey, Happy Saturday. We're gonna pick up right where we
left off. Last Saturday. Listener Erica requested our past episodes
on the Brontes as Saturday Classics back in April, and
these originally came out in twelve. They are probably the
episodes that get the most praise from our long time listeners.
They're one of the most popular episodes of the Sarah
and Bablina era. So today's installment is called From Bronte
(00:26):
to Bell and Back and it is all about the
Bronte sisters rising fame as they began publishing their novels.
Also about their brother, who you don't hear about as often.
Welcome to Steph you missed in history class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
(00:51):
I'm Sarah Dowdy and I'm Deblina Chocolate Boardy and we
are going back to the Bronte's today. We talked about
them recently and when we left off the last EPISO,
so we had just finished discussing their early lives. Charlotte, Brandwell,
Emily and Bronte's early lives. The four children of the
Reverend Patrick Bronte of Haworth and by their early twenties,
(01:13):
these four brilliant Bronte children were in a bit of
a rut. Really, Brandwell, who was expected to be a
great artist or writer, the really the pride of the
family is the only son, was working as a railway
clerk and becoming increasingly reliant on alcohol and opium. The
three girls, meanwhile, had at various points taken unpleasant teaching
(01:34):
jobs to governessing jobs that they really weren't that well
suited for. Yeah, so it seems like a blessing. One
inty one. Their living aunt, Elizabeth Branwell, proposed using her
savings to set the girls up with their own school.
Charlotte quickly sweetened the deal by convincing her aunt father.
To make the school work, they need some accomplishments like
flawless French and a good grasp of Italian and German,
(01:58):
So they hatched this plan. Arlen and Emily would study
for six months at the Poncionale j and Brussels before
coming back, reuniting with Anne and opening up their own school. So, yeah,
it really sounds like a pretty good plan. But for
nature loving home body Emily, leaving Howard was really painful.
She loved being out in the Moors. For Charlotte, though
(02:19):
it was thrilling. It was so exciting to finally get
out into the world and experience some of all that
she had been reading about for years and years. The
two shy, kind of country Bronte girls must have really
stood out among their fancier and their Catholic Belgian peers.
That Madame J's school for girls, but they did pretty
well with their lessons. They took private French lessons from
(02:41):
Monsieur a J, who was a respected professor, and they
were really doing so well, in fact, that at the
end of their six months of study, Madame J suggested
that they stay on for a while longer. Charlotte would
teach English, Emily would instruct music, and that would be
kind of a trade for their lessons, so they wouldn't
have to keep on funding their own schooling. But in
(03:04):
October eighty two word came that Aunt Brandwell was dead,
so they headed home, finding that Brandwell was also there,
having been fired from his railroad job after a discrepancy
was found in the accounts, so brand Well was added again.
It's no wonder that Charlotte was soon eager to accept
the A J's invitation to return to Belgium and continue
(03:25):
her studies and would keep Governess sing and Emily would
tend to their father, who was increasingly suffering from cataracts. Again,
in one year they'd reunite and finally start their school together.
This guy around, however, Charlotte didn't exactly concentrate fully on
her studies. Things were okay at first, but without her
sister Emily there, she became very lonely, and she started
(03:47):
to fixate more and more on her master, her professor
and wills. And if you'd like to see another side
of Charlotte, one that almost helps reconcile her as the
author of the passionate book, Jane Eyre, I'd recommend checking
out these letters to Monsieur a J. They're kind of
like love letters but not. And consequently, Charlotte's friends, the
(04:10):
a J's and their children and countless Bronte historians have
tried to figure out what exactly was going on between
these two, Whether Charlotte loved Monsieur a J in a
romantic way, whether he was innocent and encouraging that admiration,
you know, or whether he was just interested in her
as a student, somebody who wanted to help learn French
(04:32):
better and appreciate literature more. And then whether Charlotte even
realized that her platonic obsession could be mistaken by some
people as adulterous love for this guy who was married
and had a large and constantly growing family. So she
might have just been a little bit naive in that respect.
But even if Charlotte was unaware of the way her
feelings could be taken, Madam A Jay was not. As
(04:55):
Charlotte's second year in Belgium, war on Madam Aja ended
the pairs one on in English lessons. She started acting
really coolly towards Charlotte as well, and Charlotte even came
to believe that Madam Jay had another teacher spy on her.
By the end of the year, Charlotte was packing her
bags to head back to Haworth, where she started correspondence.
Those first letters must have been appropriate enough. We don't
(05:18):
know what they contained because they don't survive. But after
a few months, Monsieur a j stopped writing back and
Charlotte got even more desperate. Fortunately, though, these letters do
survive because even though Monsieur a ripped them up, his
wife stitched them back together. As quote a safeguard for
the future. According to Charlotte Bronte's biographer Rebecca Frasier, Um,
(05:42):
just to give you an example of the kind of
writing we're talking about, I mean, it does sound very
much like a love letter. Here's an example from a
January letter. Charlotte wrote, quote, all I know is that
I cannot that I will not resign myself to lose
wholly the friendship of my master. I would rather suffer
the greatest physical pain and then always have my heart
(06:03):
lacerated by smarting regrets. If my master withdraws his friendship
from me entirely, I shall be all together without hope.
If he gives me a little, just a little, I
shall be satisfied, happy, I shall have reason for living,
on for working. So like a love letter, but again
not quite like a love letter, something kind of in between,
(06:25):
but also clearly kind of inappropriate. Yeah, it's ambiguous, but
there's definitely some sort of very strong attachment there. Meanwhile, though,
the Bronte ladies were making arrangements for their long planned
school because Mr Bronte's cataracts had nearly blinded him. Emily
and Charlotte decided the school should be at the parsonage,
which was kind of a bad idea since, as you'll remember,
(06:47):
it was pretty out of the way, so it was
impossible for students to find. And that was really unfortunate too,
because by the summer of all of the Bronte children
were at home again and unemployed. Lloyd Anne had resigned
her four year position as the governess for the Robinson
family in June, mysteriously writing in her secret diary. By
(07:08):
the way, I quote, I was then at Thorpe Green
and now I am only just escaped from it. During
my stay, I've had some very unpleasant and undreamt of
experiences of human nature. Kind of a strange thing to
write a month after you leave a job. And then
in July Brandwell had his own sort of strange exit
(07:29):
from employment. He had been working for the Robinson's as
a tutor also, and he got a note from his
boss Will on vacation. The gist of it was, I
know what you did. It's despicable. Don't ever contact me
or my family again. Quote on pain of exposure nikes.
So that's a pretty serious way to be dismissed. And
(07:50):
it seems that while Charlotte was wrestling with her possibly
adulterous feelings for Monsieur j but likely no more than feelings.
Brand Will was having an act full affair with the
mother of his pupil, appropriately enough named Mrs Robinson um
or at least that was Brandwell's version of the story,
the one that he told to his drinking buddies that
(08:11):
he had had a long term affair with the promises
of eventually running away together, eventually marrying. Brandwell of course
dreaming of being supported by this wealthier woman and being
able to indulge his talents, you know, write poetry, right, novels, paint,
that sort of thing. So again, it's unclear exactly what
happened between the two of them, but there are some facts.
(08:33):
At the time of Brandwell's dismissal, Mr Robinson was dying
and Mrs Robinson did marry again, but she married again
to a very well connected, wealthy man, not an improverished tutor.
Mrs Robinson's doctor also later sent Brandwell large amounts of money,
and her coachman eventually paid a secret visit to Brandwell.
(08:54):
So something fishy going on there. We're just not sure
what The only problem with the whole brand Will and
was Robinson romance scenario is that Mr Robinson clearly thought
only Brandwell was at fault, you know, hence the on
pain of exposure. Yeah, that doesn't sound like he's going
to expose his wife to public scrutiny. It sounds like
(09:15):
everybody will blame brand Well if what happened comes out. Plus,
let's just be honest, who could really trust Brandwell? At
this point, he was getting into a pattern of raving
all night long and passing out during the day. Over
the next year, he set his bed on fire. He
was actually rescued by Emily and he had to start
sleeping in Mr Bronte's room, which was kind of a
(09:35):
scary thought since Mr Bronte famously slept with a loaded pistol,
and because Brandwell was kind of threatening his own life
by this point. So during all of this drama, the
three Bronte women were ironically creating their own drama. Charlotte
had started writing The Professor, Anne was writing Agnes Gray,
and Emily was working on Weathering Heights. But they still
(09:59):
might have just toyed away on their novels like another
piece of Angan or Gondol fiction. If Charlotte hadn't discovered
a manuscript of Emily's poems in the Fall of Etive.
I mean, you can imagine she was completely excited, completely
thrilled to make this discovery, and she wrote about that
a lot later, sometimes publicly, but in a later letter
(10:19):
she wrote, they stirred my heart like the sound of
a trumpet when I read them alone and in secret.
The deep excitement I felt forced from me the confession
of the discovery I had made. I was sternly rated
at first for having taken an unwarrantable liberty. So you
can imagine Emily was not pleased with her big sister
reading her secret poem she had been working on. But
(10:41):
after some strong convincing, Charlotte did talk Emily into publishing
a group volume. So if all the sisters published, it
would be okay, and they would also publish under gender
ambiguous pseudonyms Kerr, Ellis and Acton Bell. A lot of
speculation of out where that name Bell came from, though yeah,
(11:04):
Bell was possibly chosen as a joke on Mr Bronte's curate,
Mr Arthur Bell Nichols, who apparently really amused these women
by bragging about his Bell relations. He'll come up again.
So that's a good name to remember, even aside from
the pseudonym relation. Indeed, so financed by their aunt savings
(11:31):
and with Charlotte acting as the mysterious Bells literary agent,
they published poems by Kerr Ellis and Acton Bell on
the best paper they could afford, and the book got
some great reviews. The critic called it a quote ray
of sunshine. But it's still only sold two copies. But
still they were published writers, which was something. I mean,
it probably gave them the confidence to keep on writing
(11:54):
and do what they were about to do, because by
the summer of eighty six, the Brontes were really shopping
around the novels, this time unwilling to front the entire
cost of publishing themselves. They weren't willing to go vanity
all the way, but they were finding no takers for
their three novels. The same day that Charlotte attended her
father's cataract surgery in Manchester, she found that they had
(12:16):
been rejected. So she was in kind of a bad place.
She was in Manchester, her father was recovering from his
eye surgery, you know, a nineteen century eye surgery. You
can imagine kind of unpleasant. It was a long recovery.
It required total silence. Her novel wasn't getting anywhere, and
(12:36):
so she started to write a new book called Jane Ere.
She wrote for three weeks straight, and by the time
her father had the okay to go home in September,
she had written all the way through Jane and Mr
Rochester's canceled wedding in Jane's White which when you read
Jane here, I think it'll be neat next time. I
next time I read it to know that breaking point
(12:58):
in her writing, because looking back on it, you can
see there's a definitive shift in the tone of the novel.
And I can definitely imagine that first part being written
in this frenzy. That's true. But three weeks that's amazing
to me. Anne hadn't let rejection stop her either. She
had started writing the tenant of Wildfill Hall, and with
(13:19):
Charlotte home again, she Emily and Anne would take turns
reading new chapters of their books around the fire, and
I would just love to be a fly on the
wall in that room. But by the following summer they
had an offer from Newby Publishers in London for Anne
and Emily's books, and Charlotte continued to shop the professor around,
setting it to Smith Eldering Company, where it was read
by A William Smith. Williams and Williams read the book
(13:42):
and he rejected it, but not without also encouraging the
author to submit something with a bit more action, maybe
a bit like Jane Eyre. Perhaps so, Charlotte sent off
her exciting new second manuscript to Williams in August. He
read the manuscript, he handed it over to his boss,
George Smith, who read it in one day, and the
(14:04):
firm published the new novel by October, to almost immediate
and overwhelming acclaim. I mean, just this remarkable that you
had finished this novel, you know, polish it up in August,
send it off and it would be published and a
hit by October. It's hard to imagine today, I think
a new book being as much of a cultural phenomenon
(14:24):
as Jane Eyre was. Ellen Charlotte's dear friend wrote a
visiting London during the first height of bell Fever, and
she said, when I reached London, I found there was
quite a furor about the authorship of the new novel.
The work was quickly obtained and as soon as it arrived,
it was seized upon and the first half page read aloud.
(14:46):
It was as though Charlotte Bronte herself was present in
every word, her voice and spirit thrilling through and through.
Everybody was talking about it. Gradually, though, the tone of
the reviews began to change from ecstatic to critical. Reviewers
found the novel course your religious more salacious. Gossip started
when Charlotte decided to dedicate the second addition to her
(15:07):
literary hero William Thackeray. That was kind of a mistake
because it turned out that Thackeray himself had a mad wife,
and folks started guessing that Kerr Bell was actually Thackery's mistress. Yeah,
you can imagine. All parties were pretty embarrassed by this discovery.
Despite the gossip, though in the hurtful interpretations of Charlotte's work,
at least her book was very popular. It was selling well.
(15:30):
Weathering Heights, meanwhile, was getting terrible reviews. The Atlas called
it quote strange and in artistic story. Many readers figured
that it must have come from this particularly wicked mine.
I mean today, it's it's just so strange to imagine
people um dissing on Weathering Heights so much. It's a
classic something you reathe in every high school English class.
(15:54):
But um people were seriously disturbed by it at the time.
Agnes Gray, a book novelist George Moore later called quote
as simple and beautiful as a muslin dress, hardly earned
any buzz at all. At almost worse, some also started
accusing the Bells of being one writer, a theory which
was encouraged by Emily and Anne's own publisher, who was
(16:15):
hoping to cash in on the success of Cura Bell.
The confusion finally got bad enough for Charlotte and to
practically run to the nearest town in order to get
to London meet Mr Smith and prove that there were
at least two Bells. So then there's a big change
in this story. It's this rapid ascent of fame. But
in the fall of eight less than a year after
(16:36):
the appearance of Jane Eyre, the Brontes world really began
to transform. It started with Branwell dying in September, and
he may have seemed like he was in constant danger
of drinking himself to death or committing suicide, or having
some unfortunate accident. While sleeping in the room with the
loaded pistols, but no one in the family had really
(16:56):
realized that he was seriously ill with tuberculos. This as
well his alcoholism had effectively covered it up until almost
the very end. And one of the details about all
the Brontes lives would There are so many sad details
we could choose from, but one of the saddest me
is that Charlotte, Emily and Anne never told their brother
that they had become famous authors. They finally did tell
(17:18):
their father, but they just didn't feel up to letting
Brandwell know, and as Charlotte later wrote, fear of causing
him too deep a pang of remorse for his own
time misspent and talents misapplied. And that was their reason
for holding it back for them, you know, the their
fellow writer in childhood. Something about that so tragic. Another
(17:40):
weird thing, According to Encyclopedia Britannica, some of Branwell's friends
later thought he had co authored Weathering Heights because it
was so masculine. And I mean that makes the whole
thing that they never told him at all even more
strange that it almost would fit with him. And after
Brandwell's death, the bad news just kind of kept coming
for the bronte As Emily got a cold at Brandwell's funeral.
(18:02):
By December, she was also dead from tuberculosis. Her dog
keeper walked in the funeral procession with the Brontes and
their servants. He sat in their pew at the church,
and he lay outside of her empty room for a
week and how old. And just a few weeks after that,
Anne was also diagnosed with tuberculosis, and unlike Emily, who
had really resisted any kind of medicine, any kind of
(18:24):
doctor's interference until the literal end um, Anne took every
possible remedy, including a trip to the sea in May,
but she died May away from home. So just one
year brings three published novels, and the next year brings
three family deaths. It's kind of the remarkable tragedy of
(18:46):
the Brontes lives. And home was obviously so sad and
so lonely for Charlotte, now the only surviving child of six.
She wrote about how happy the dogs were when she
came home because they thought that maybe the other two
weren't too far behind, and she just felt really lonely.
Her father was um a kind of distant during this
(19:08):
time too, as you can imagine. So the next period
of Charlotte's life bounced between this loneliness and depression at
home and then brief getaways filled with festivals and treats
that were worthy of a famous novelist, because of course,
her fame hadn't gone away in the meantime, she had
just kind of left it for a while. She finished
her second which was really her third work entitled Shirley,
(19:31):
and made a second visit to London, clad and Stable,
picked out by her friend Ellen, and on her third
trip to London, she was showered with attention from a publisher,
George Smith. They even visited the zoo together, and they
kind of stalked the Duke of Wellington together, which was
really fun for her, Charlotte's hero, her childhood hero. I
think they sort of waited for him like on his
(19:51):
church root and caught a few glimpses of him. During
this period, Charlotte also met the novelist Mrs Elizabeth Gaskell,
who turned out to be her future biographer and who
was really quickly impressed by Charlotte's hard life story and
(20:11):
her talent and wanted to help her rehabilitate her image
a little bit, so gradually word was starting to slowly
creep out that Kerr Bell was actually Charlotte Bronte, even
back home in Yorkshire. And one funny account, Charlotte wrote
to Ellen that her family's made Martha came to her saying, quote,
I've heard such news, please, ma'am. You've been and written
(20:33):
two books, the grandest books that ever was seen. And
I thought it was really funny to learn that. While
Charlotte started to handle her fame in London, you know,
she got to meet her famous author friends and do
all of that, do fun things. She was a little
bit terrified with being known as this famous author back
home because it meant that her actual her actual neighbors
(20:56):
would go and try to figure out who were the
characters in her book books, which does sound pretty terrifying,
and she had to be around them all the time
she did. She couldn't go go back to her tiny
home and forget about it all. So amid all of
this growing fame, though, Charlotte attracted a third suitor. We
talked about her first two in the first part of
(21:16):
this little series, but this guy was James Taylor, who
was an agent at her publisher, and they've been writing
to each other for some time, but really their correspondence
was kind of third rung with her literary correspondence at
her publishing. How she had always sort of preferred writing
to Mr Williams, the guy who had discovered her. They
(21:36):
talked about books and all sorts of things, and then
she was obviously starting to get a bit of a
crush on the publisher himself, Mr George Smith, he of
the zoo trips and the lavish attentions. Mr Taylor, though,
had kind of a thing for Charlotte, and he ended
up being spurred on by his impending move to India
to go ahead declare his love for her and propose.
(22:00):
Charlotte of course refused, but it's certainly got her thinking
about that growing crush on George Smith. But her next
trip to London must have really squashed this idea. She
wasn't the only one thinking about it too. It seems
that even her father, Patrick Bronte, seemed to have some
hopes or ideas that she might end up with George Smith.
(22:20):
It turned out, though, on that next trip that Smith
was clearly just going to be a friend, just going
to be her publisher, and she made that quite obvious
in a somewhat awkward way in her final complete novel,
The Lett, by having the Charlotte like heroine not end
up with the George Smith like Dr John Graham bretton which,
of course I mean that's awkward because Mr Smith was
(22:43):
of course reading these manuscripts and figuring out, oh, that
would be awkward. So that sort of chance that love
didn't work out for Charlotte. But she had other things
to keep her busy when she wasn't so bothered by
her own characterization in the press as an immoral course writer.
She disliked her sister's memories being disrespected. According to an
(23:06):
article in Women's Writing by Susan R. Bauman, it's largely
Charlotte who's responsible for Emily's later reputation as the wild
more poetus and Anne's as the devotional Christian writer. And
she did this by shaming reviewers with biographical details of
her sister's lives and sad deaths, editing and publishing more
of their poems, and more strangely, sometimes even agreeing with
(23:29):
critics negative assessments of their work. So consequently, some Bronte
biographers considered Charlotte the Snafari's curator of her sister's writing.
Bauman mentioned theories ranging from Charlotte tricking Emily into revealing
her poetry, so not just like I can't believe you
read my poetry, but let's get over it in a bit,
(23:49):
something more serious than that, um, And then theories even
as extreme as Charlotte purposefully destroying Emily's second novel after
her death out of jealousy andesing to note here, since
Charlotte is so very much responsible for the way people
ultimately saw Emily Bronte and Bronte, her own life was
(24:11):
shaped largely by Mrs Gaskell's biography that came out after
Charlotte's death, which really turned her from this sketchy writer
of naughty books to a heartbroken, admirable churchgoing woman who
had never neglected her more I don't know quote womanly
duties at home. She was the parson's daughter. She was
(24:33):
the parson's wife, um, not the scandalous writer that she
was depicted us. Charlotte's posthumous reputation was also shaped by
her widower. Remember that Mr Nichols, the curate that we
talked about earlier, this is why we asked you to
remember him. While Charlotte had gone from making fun of
him with her sisters to at least thinking of him
as a nice guy, he had fallen head over heels
(24:56):
without her even noticing. And on December fifty three she
received the fourth out of nowhere proposal of her life.
And this time Charlotte's father was furious that his poor
Irish curate um kind of a lot like himself, would
court his daughter. You know, he really thought that Charlotte
deserved somebody with more money, somebody with more prestige. But
(25:19):
instead of calling under some rock and disappearing, Nichols escalated
this courtship to really an all out war with Mr Bronte.
It was so awkward he handed in his notice, but
he was stuck in the town for several months, having
to see each other all the time. Charlotte once um
Once Mr Nichols did eventually leave Howard, Charlotte eventually got
(25:40):
permission from her father to start communicating with him and
uh eventually start visiting him. She's thirty seven at this point,
to just consider that, and then ultimately they married in
June eighteen fifty four. Her father was supposedly too sick
to attend the ceremony, so she was given away by
her old friend, Miss Waller, whose school she had attended
(26:02):
so many years before, and wore a white embroidered dress,
a bonnet and a veil, and was said to look
like a little snow drop there in the middle of
the in the middle of the summer. By December, Charlotte
was writing to Ellen hinting of a pregnancy, but from
that point on she only got sicker and sicker. She
died March thirty one, eight and it's kind of unclear
(26:24):
exactly what she died of. I think it's generally accepted
that it may have been tuberculosis was the official cause.
It could have been also dehydration from really extreme morning sickness.
That's another theory that's out there. Yeah, there are several theories,
or just that Charlotte's health was not so great anyway,
she had suffered from ill health for a long time,
(26:45):
and that maybe her pregnancy um kind of escalated latent tuberculosis.
But a month before her death, she had interestingly changed
her will to benefit Mr Nichols, so his attentions to
her during her sickness and four must have really impressed
her because when they had first gotten married, she had
set it up so he'd have zero control over her
(27:08):
estate even if she died childless, which was kind of
an unusual arrangement for a married couple at the time.
And um, he wouldn't even be able to access her
money for debts that sort of thing. Mr Nichols cared
for Mr Bronte for six more years until his death.
Mr Bronte is sometimes considered a too stern, too self
(27:29):
interested figure, but one has to feel for him. I mean,
he lost all six of his children. Of his own
famous temper, he supposedly said quote, had I been numbered
amongst the calm, sedate, concentric men of the world, I should,
in all probability never have had such children as mine.
And I think that's an interesting point to start to
(27:49):
wrap this up on Mrs Gaskell's biography sort of wonders
what would Charlotte Bronte have been like if she had
been brought up in a healthy and happy situation. But
Mr Bronte's own words how much his personality likely shaped
his children, shows that it almost did seem to be
a requirement that they had this isolated upbringing, This unhealthy
(28:13):
atmosphere they lived in, and the development of their intense
imaginations almost came from that. It's also neat too. I
think that we rarely talk about our subjects in such
a broad view as this, But I read a New
Yorker article on the Bronte myth and noted that the
sisters have really been quote remolded in successive generations to
(28:35):
fit with different agendas, Freudian feminist agendas, and that's so
strange to me. It has been interesting to learn about
a biography and how that's connected to the writer's works,
but also how much these lives are open to interpretation.
(28:59):
Thank you so much for joining us for this Saturday classic.
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be obsolete now. So here is our current contact information.
We are at History Podcast at how stuff Works dot com,
and then we're at Missed in the History all over
(29:19):
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Hey, Happy Saturday. We're gonna pick up right where we
left off. Last Saturday. Listener Erica requested our past episodes
on the Brontes as Saturday Classics back in April, and
these originally came out in twelve. They are probably the
episodes that get the most praise from our long time listeners.
They're one of the most popular episodes of the Sarah
and Bablina era. So today's installment is called From Bronte
(00:26):
to Bell and Back and it is all about the
Bronte sisters rising fame as they began publishing their novels.
Also about their brother, who you don't hear about as often.
Welcome to Steph you missed in history class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
(00:51):
I'm Sarah Dowdy and I'm Deblina Chocolate Boardy and we
are going back to the Bronte's today. We talked about
them recently and when we left off the last EPISO,
so we had just finished discussing their early lives. Charlotte, Brandwell,
Emily and Bronte's early lives. The four children of the
Reverend Patrick Bronte of Haworth and by their early twenties,
(01:13):
these four brilliant Bronte children were in a bit of
a rut. Really, Brandwell, who was expected to be a
great artist or writer, the really the pride of the
family is the only son, was working as a railway
clerk and becoming increasingly reliant on alcohol and opium. The
three girls, meanwhile, had at various points taken unpleasant teaching
(01:34):
jobs to governessing jobs that they really weren't that well
suited for. Yeah, so it seems like a blessing. One
inty one. Their living aunt, Elizabeth Branwell, proposed using her
savings to set the girls up with their own school.
Charlotte quickly sweetened the deal by convincing her aunt father.
To make the school work, they need some accomplishments like
flawless French and a good grasp of Italian and German,
(01:58):
So they hatched this plan. Arlen and Emily would study
for six months at the Poncionale j and Brussels before
coming back, reuniting with Anne and opening up their own school. So, yeah,
it really sounds like a pretty good plan. But for
nature loving home body Emily, leaving Howard was really painful.
She loved being out in the Moors. For Charlotte, though
(02:19):
it was thrilling. It was so exciting to finally get
out into the world and experience some of all that
she had been reading about for years and years. The
two shy, kind of country Bronte girls must have really
stood out among their fancier and their Catholic Belgian peers.
That Madame J's school for girls, but they did pretty
well with their lessons. They took private French lessons from
(02:41):
Monsieur a J, who was a respected professor, and they
were really doing so well, in fact, that at the
end of their six months of study, Madame J suggested
that they stay on for a while longer. Charlotte would
teach English, Emily would instruct music, and that would be
kind of a trade for their lessons, so they wouldn't
have to keep on funding their own schooling. But in
(03:04):
October eighty two word came that Aunt Brandwell was dead,
so they headed home, finding that Brandwell was also there,
having been fired from his railroad job after a discrepancy
was found in the accounts, so brand Well was added again.
It's no wonder that Charlotte was soon eager to accept
the A J's invitation to return to Belgium and continue
(03:25):
her studies and would keep Governess sing and Emily would
tend to their father, who was increasingly suffering from cataracts. Again,
in one year they'd reunite and finally start their school together.
This guy around, however, Charlotte didn't exactly concentrate fully on
her studies. Things were okay at first, but without her
sister Emily there, she became very lonely, and she started
(03:47):
to fixate more and more on her master, her professor
and wills. And if you'd like to see another side
of Charlotte, one that almost helps reconcile her as the
author of the passionate book, Jane Eyre, I'd recommend checking
out these letters to Monsieur a J. They're kind of
like love letters but not. And consequently, Charlotte's friends, the
(04:10):
a J's and their children and countless Bronte historians have
tried to figure out what exactly was going on between
these two, Whether Charlotte loved Monsieur a J in a
romantic way, whether he was innocent and encouraging that admiration,
you know, or whether he was just interested in her
as a student, somebody who wanted to help learn French
(04:32):
better and appreciate literature more. And then whether Charlotte even
realized that her platonic obsession could be mistaken by some
people as adulterous love for this guy who was married
and had a large and constantly growing family. So she
might have just been a little bit naive in that respect.
But even if Charlotte was unaware of the way her
feelings could be taken, Madam A Jay was not. As
(04:55):
Charlotte's second year in Belgium, war on Madam Aja ended
the pairs one on in English lessons. She started acting
really coolly towards Charlotte as well, and Charlotte even came
to believe that Madam Jay had another teacher spy on her.
By the end of the year, Charlotte was packing her
bags to head back to Haworth, where she started correspondence.
Those first letters must have been appropriate enough. We don't
(05:18):
know what they contained because they don't survive. But after
a few months, Monsieur a j stopped writing back and
Charlotte got even more desperate. Fortunately, though, these letters do
survive because even though Monsieur a ripped them up, his
wife stitched them back together. As quote a safeguard for
the future. According to Charlotte Bronte's biographer Rebecca Frasier, Um,
(05:42):
just to give you an example of the kind of
writing we're talking about, I mean, it does sound very
much like a love letter. Here's an example from a
January letter. Charlotte wrote, quote, all I know is that
I cannot that I will not resign myself to lose
wholly the friendship of my master. I would rather suffer
the greatest physical pain and then always have my heart
(06:03):
lacerated by smarting regrets. If my master withdraws his friendship
from me entirely, I shall be all together without hope.
If he gives me a little, just a little, I
shall be satisfied, happy, I shall have reason for living,
on for working. So like a love letter, but again
not quite like a love letter, something kind of in between,
(06:25):
but also clearly kind of inappropriate. Yeah, it's ambiguous, but
there's definitely some sort of very strong attachment there. Meanwhile, though,
the Bronte ladies were making arrangements for their long planned
school because Mr Bronte's cataracts had nearly blinded him. Emily
and Charlotte decided the school should be at the parsonage,
which was kind of a bad idea since, as you'll remember,
(06:47):
it was pretty out of the way, so it was
impossible for students to find. And that was really unfortunate too,
because by the summer of all of the Bronte children
were at home again and unemployed. Lloyd Anne had resigned
her four year position as the governess for the Robinson
family in June, mysteriously writing in her secret diary. By
(07:08):
the way, I quote, I was then at Thorpe Green
and now I am only just escaped from it. During
my stay, I've had some very unpleasant and undreamt of
experiences of human nature. Kind of a strange thing to
write a month after you leave a job. And then
in July Brandwell had his own sort of strange exit
(07:29):
from employment. He had been working for the Robinson's as
a tutor also, and he got a note from his
boss Will on vacation. The gist of it was, I
know what you did. It's despicable. Don't ever contact me
or my family again. Quote on pain of exposure nikes.
So that's a pretty serious way to be dismissed. And
(07:50):
it seems that while Charlotte was wrestling with her possibly
adulterous feelings for Monsieur j but likely no more than feelings.
Brand Will was having an act full affair with the
mother of his pupil, appropriately enough named Mrs Robinson um
or at least that was Brandwell's version of the story,
the one that he told to his drinking buddies that
(08:11):
he had had a long term affair with the promises
of eventually running away together, eventually marrying. Brandwell of course
dreaming of being supported by this wealthier woman and being
able to indulge his talents, you know, write poetry, right, novels, paint,
that sort of thing. So again, it's unclear exactly what
happened between the two of them, but there are some facts.
(08:33):
At the time of Brandwell's dismissal, Mr Robinson was dying
and Mrs Robinson did marry again, but she married again
to a very well connected, wealthy man, not an improverished tutor.
Mrs Robinson's doctor also later sent Brandwell large amounts of money,
and her coachman eventually paid a secret visit to Brandwell.
(08:54):
So something fishy going on there. We're just not sure
what The only problem with the whole brand Will and
was Robinson romance scenario is that Mr Robinson clearly thought
only Brandwell was at fault, you know, hence the on
pain of exposure. Yeah, that doesn't sound like he's going
to expose his wife to public scrutiny. It sounds like
(09:15):
everybody will blame brand Well if what happened comes out. Plus,
let's just be honest, who could really trust Brandwell? At
this point, he was getting into a pattern of raving
all night long and passing out during the day. Over
the next year, he set his bed on fire. He
was actually rescued by Emily and he had to start
sleeping in Mr Bronte's room, which was kind of a
(09:35):
scary thought since Mr Bronte famously slept with a loaded pistol,
and because Brandwell was kind of threatening his own life
by this point. So during all of this drama, the
three Bronte women were ironically creating their own drama. Charlotte
had started writing The Professor, Anne was writing Agnes Gray,
and Emily was working on Weathering Heights. But they still
(09:59):
might have just toyed away on their novels like another
piece of Angan or Gondol fiction. If Charlotte hadn't discovered
a manuscript of Emily's poems in the Fall of Etive.
I mean, you can imagine she was completely excited, completely
thrilled to make this discovery, and she wrote about that
a lot later, sometimes publicly, but in a later letter
(10:19):
she wrote, they stirred my heart like the sound of
a trumpet when I read them alone and in secret.
The deep excitement I felt forced from me the confession
of the discovery I had made. I was sternly rated
at first for having taken an unwarrantable liberty. So you
can imagine Emily was not pleased with her big sister
reading her secret poem she had been working on. But
(10:41):
after some strong convincing, Charlotte did talk Emily into publishing
a group volume. So if all the sisters published, it
would be okay, and they would also publish under gender
ambiguous pseudonyms Kerr, Ellis and Acton Bell. A lot of
speculation of out where that name Bell came from, though yeah,
(11:04):
Bell was possibly chosen as a joke on Mr Bronte's curate,
Mr Arthur Bell Nichols, who apparently really amused these women
by bragging about his Bell relations. He'll come up again.
So that's a good name to remember, even aside from
the pseudonym relation. Indeed, so financed by their aunt savings
(11:31):
and with Charlotte acting as the mysterious Bells literary agent,
they published poems by Kerr Ellis and Acton Bell on
the best paper they could afford, and the book got
some great reviews. The critic called it a quote ray
of sunshine. But it's still only sold two copies. But
still they were published writers, which was something. I mean,
it probably gave them the confidence to keep on writing
(11:54):
and do what they were about to do, because by
the summer of eighty six, the Brontes were really shopping
around the novels, this time unwilling to front the entire
cost of publishing themselves. They weren't willing to go vanity
all the way, but they were finding no takers for
their three novels. The same day that Charlotte attended her
father's cataract surgery in Manchester, she found that they had
(12:16):
been rejected. So she was in kind of a bad place.
She was in Manchester, her father was recovering from his
eye surgery, you know, a nineteen century eye surgery. You
can imagine kind of unpleasant. It was a long recovery.
It required total silence. Her novel wasn't getting anywhere, and
(12:36):
so she started to write a new book called Jane Ere.
She wrote for three weeks straight, and by the time
her father had the okay to go home in September,
she had written all the way through Jane and Mr
Rochester's canceled wedding in Jane's White which when you read
Jane here, I think it'll be neat next time. I
next time I read it to know that breaking point
(12:58):
in her writing, because looking back on it, you can
see there's a definitive shift in the tone of the novel.
And I can definitely imagine that first part being written
in this frenzy. That's true. But three weeks that's amazing
to me. Anne hadn't let rejection stop her either. She
had started writing the tenant of Wildfill Hall, and with
(13:19):
Charlotte home again, she Emily and Anne would take turns
reading new chapters of their books around the fire, and
I would just love to be a fly on the
wall in that room. But by the following summer they
had an offer from Newby Publishers in London for Anne
and Emily's books, and Charlotte continued to shop the professor around,
setting it to Smith Eldering Company, where it was read
by A William Smith. Williams and Williams read the book
(13:42):
and he rejected it, but not without also encouraging the
author to submit something with a bit more action, maybe
a bit like Jane Eyre. Perhaps so, Charlotte sent off
her exciting new second manuscript to Williams in August. He
read the manuscript, he handed it over to his boss,
George Smith, who read it in one day, and the
(14:04):
firm published the new novel by October, to almost immediate
and overwhelming acclaim. I mean, just this remarkable that you
had finished this novel, you know, polish it up in August,
send it off and it would be published and a
hit by October. It's hard to imagine today, I think
a new book being as much of a cultural phenomenon
(14:24):
as Jane Eyre was. Ellen Charlotte's dear friend wrote a
visiting London during the first height of bell Fever, and
she said, when I reached London, I found there was
quite a furor about the authorship of the new novel.
The work was quickly obtained and as soon as it arrived,
it was seized upon and the first half page read aloud.
(14:46):
It was as though Charlotte Bronte herself was present in
every word, her voice and spirit thrilling through and through.
Everybody was talking about it. Gradually, though, the tone of
the reviews began to change from ecstatic to critical. Reviewers
found the novel course your religious more salacious. Gossip started
when Charlotte decided to dedicate the second addition to her
(15:07):
literary hero William Thackeray. That was kind of a mistake
because it turned out that Thackeray himself had a mad wife,
and folks started guessing that Kerr Bell was actually Thackery's mistress. Yeah,
you can imagine. All parties were pretty embarrassed by this discovery.
Despite the gossip, though in the hurtful interpretations of Charlotte's work,
at least her book was very popular. It was selling well.
(15:30):
Weathering Heights, meanwhile, was getting terrible reviews. The Atlas called
it quote strange and in artistic story. Many readers figured
that it must have come from this particularly wicked mine.
I mean today, it's it's just so strange to imagine
people um dissing on Weathering Heights so much. It's a
classic something you reathe in every high school English class.
(15:54):
But um people were seriously disturbed by it at the time.
Agnes Gray, a book novelist George Moore later called quote
as simple and beautiful as a muslin dress, hardly earned
any buzz at all. At almost worse, some also started
accusing the Bells of being one writer, a theory which
was encouraged by Emily and Anne's own publisher, who was
(16:15):
hoping to cash in on the success of Cura Bell.
The confusion finally got bad enough for Charlotte and to
practically run to the nearest town in order to get
to London meet Mr Smith and prove that there were
at least two Bells. So then there's a big change
in this story. It's this rapid ascent of fame. But
in the fall of eight less than a year after
(16:36):
the appearance of Jane Eyre, the Brontes world really began
to transform. It started with Branwell dying in September, and
he may have seemed like he was in constant danger
of drinking himself to death or committing suicide, or having
some unfortunate accident. While sleeping in the room with the
loaded pistols, but no one in the family had really
(16:56):
realized that he was seriously ill with tuberculos. This as
well his alcoholism had effectively covered it up until almost
the very end. And one of the details about all
the Brontes lives would There are so many sad details
we could choose from, but one of the saddest me
is that Charlotte, Emily and Anne never told their brother
that they had become famous authors. They finally did tell
(17:18):
their father, but they just didn't feel up to letting
Brandwell know, and as Charlotte later wrote, fear of causing
him too deep a pang of remorse for his own
time misspent and talents misapplied. And that was their reason
for holding it back for them, you know, the their
fellow writer in childhood. Something about that so tragic. Another
(17:40):
weird thing, According to Encyclopedia Britannica, some of Branwell's friends
later thought he had co authored Weathering Heights because it
was so masculine. And I mean that makes the whole
thing that they never told him at all even more
strange that it almost would fit with him. And after
Brandwell's death, the bad news just kind of kept coming
for the bronte As Emily got a cold at Brandwell's funeral.
(18:02):
By December, she was also dead from tuberculosis. Her dog
keeper walked in the funeral procession with the Brontes and
their servants. He sat in their pew at the church,
and he lay outside of her empty room for a
week and how old. And just a few weeks after that,
Anne was also diagnosed with tuberculosis, and unlike Emily, who
had really resisted any kind of medicine, any kind of
(18:24):
doctor's interference until the literal end um, Anne took every
possible remedy, including a trip to the sea in May,
but she died May away from home. So just one
year brings three published novels, and the next year brings
three family deaths. It's kind of the remarkable tragedy of
(18:46):
the Brontes lives. And home was obviously so sad and
so lonely for Charlotte, now the only surviving child of six.
She wrote about how happy the dogs were when she
came home because they thought that maybe the other two
weren't too far behind, and she just felt really lonely.
Her father was um a kind of distant during this
(19:08):
time too, as you can imagine. So the next period
of Charlotte's life bounced between this loneliness and depression at
home and then brief getaways filled with festivals and treats
that were worthy of a famous novelist, because of course,
her fame hadn't gone away in the meantime, she had
just kind of left it for a while. She finished
her second which was really her third work entitled Shirley,
(19:31):
and made a second visit to London, clad and Stable,
picked out by her friend Ellen, and on her third
trip to London, she was showered with attention from a publisher,
George Smith. They even visited the zoo together, and they
kind of stalked the Duke of Wellington together, which was
really fun for her, Charlotte's hero, her childhood hero. I
think they sort of waited for him like on his
(19:51):
church root and caught a few glimpses of him. During
this period, Charlotte also met the novelist Mrs Elizabeth Gaskell,
who turned out to be her future biographer and who
was really quickly impressed by Charlotte's hard life story and
(20:11):
her talent and wanted to help her rehabilitate her image
a little bit, so gradually word was starting to slowly
creep out that Kerr Bell was actually Charlotte Bronte, even
back home in Yorkshire. And one funny account, Charlotte wrote
to Ellen that her family's made Martha came to her saying, quote,
I've heard such news, please, ma'am. You've been and written
(20:33):
two books, the grandest books that ever was seen. And
I thought it was really funny to learn that. While
Charlotte started to handle her fame in London, you know,
she got to meet her famous author friends and do
all of that, do fun things. She was a little
bit terrified with being known as this famous author back
home because it meant that her actual her actual neighbors
(20:56):
would go and try to figure out who were the
characters in her book books, which does sound pretty terrifying,
and she had to be around them all the time
she did. She couldn't go go back to her tiny
home and forget about it all. So amid all of
this growing fame, though, Charlotte attracted a third suitor. We
talked about her first two in the first part of
(21:16):
this little series, but this guy was James Taylor, who
was an agent at her publisher, and they've been writing
to each other for some time, but really their correspondence
was kind of third rung with her literary correspondence at
her publishing. How she had always sort of preferred writing
to Mr Williams, the guy who had discovered her. They
(21:36):
talked about books and all sorts of things, and then
she was obviously starting to get a bit of a
crush on the publisher himself, Mr George Smith, he of
the zoo trips and the lavish attentions. Mr Taylor, though,
had kind of a thing for Charlotte, and he ended
up being spurred on by his impending move to India
to go ahead declare his love for her and propose.
(22:00):
Charlotte of course refused, but it's certainly got her thinking
about that growing crush on George Smith. But her next
trip to London must have really squashed this idea. She
wasn't the only one thinking about it too. It seems
that even her father, Patrick Bronte, seemed to have some
hopes or ideas that she might end up with George Smith.
(22:20):
It turned out, though, on that next trip that Smith
was clearly just going to be a friend, just going
to be her publisher, and she made that quite obvious
in a somewhat awkward way in her final complete novel,
The Lett, by having the Charlotte like heroine not end
up with the George Smith like Dr John Graham bretton which,
of course I mean that's awkward because Mr Smith was
(22:43):
of course reading these manuscripts and figuring out, oh, that
would be awkward. So that sort of chance that love
didn't work out for Charlotte. But she had other things
to keep her busy when she wasn't so bothered by
her own characterization in the press as an immoral course writer.
She disliked her sister's memories being disrespected. According to an
(23:06):
article in Women's Writing by Susan R. Bauman, it's largely
Charlotte who's responsible for Emily's later reputation as the wild
more poetus and Anne's as the devotional Christian writer. And
she did this by shaming reviewers with biographical details of
her sister's lives and sad deaths, editing and publishing more
of their poems, and more strangely, sometimes even agreeing with
(23:29):
critics negative assessments of their work. So consequently, some Bronte
biographers considered Charlotte the Snafari's curator of her sister's writing.
Bauman mentioned theories ranging from Charlotte tricking Emily into revealing
her poetry, so not just like I can't believe you
read my poetry, but let's get over it in a bit,
(23:49):
something more serious than that, um, And then theories even
as extreme as Charlotte purposefully destroying Emily's second novel after
her death out of jealousy andesing to note here, since
Charlotte is so very much responsible for the way people
ultimately saw Emily Bronte and Bronte, her own life was
(24:11):
shaped largely by Mrs Gaskell's biography that came out after
Charlotte's death, which really turned her from this sketchy writer
of naughty books to a heartbroken, admirable churchgoing woman who
had never neglected her more I don't know quote womanly
duties at home. She was the parson's daughter. She was
(24:33):
the parson's wife, um, not the scandalous writer that she
was depicted us. Charlotte's posthumous reputation was also shaped by
her widower. Remember that Mr Nichols, the curate that we
talked about earlier, this is why we asked you to
remember him. While Charlotte had gone from making fun of
him with her sisters to at least thinking of him
as a nice guy, he had fallen head over heels
(24:56):
without her even noticing. And on December fifty three she
received the fourth out of nowhere proposal of her life.
And this time Charlotte's father was furious that his poor
Irish curate um kind of a lot like himself, would
court his daughter. You know, he really thought that Charlotte
deserved somebody with more money, somebody with more prestige. But
(25:19):
instead of calling under some rock and disappearing, Nichols escalated
this courtship to really an all out war with Mr Bronte.
It was so awkward he handed in his notice, but
he was stuck in the town for several months, having
to see each other all the time. Charlotte once um
Once Mr Nichols did eventually leave Howard, Charlotte eventually got
(25:40):
permission from her father to start communicating with him and
uh eventually start visiting him. She's thirty seven at this point,
to just consider that, and then ultimately they married in
June eighteen fifty four. Her father was supposedly too sick
to attend the ceremony, so she was given away by
her old friend, Miss Waller, whose school she had attended
(26:02):
so many years before, and wore a white embroidered dress,
a bonnet and a veil, and was said to look
like a little snow drop there in the middle of
the in the middle of the summer. By December, Charlotte
was writing to Ellen hinting of a pregnancy, but from
that point on she only got sicker and sicker. She
died March thirty one, eight and it's kind of unclear
(26:24):
exactly what she died of. I think it's generally accepted
that it may have been tuberculosis was the official cause.
It could have been also dehydration from really extreme morning sickness.
That's another theory that's out there. Yeah, there are several theories,
or just that Charlotte's health was not so great anyway,
she had suffered from ill health for a long time,
(26:45):
and that maybe her pregnancy um kind of escalated latent tuberculosis.
But a month before her death, she had interestingly changed
her will to benefit Mr Nichols, so his attentions to
her during her sickness and four must have really impressed
her because when they had first gotten married, she had
set it up so he'd have zero control over her
(27:08):
estate even if she died childless, which was kind of
an unusual arrangement for a married couple at the time.
And um, he wouldn't even be able to access her
money for debts that sort of thing. Mr Nichols cared
for Mr Bronte for six more years until his death.
Mr Bronte is sometimes considered a too stern, too self
(27:29):
interested figure, but one has to feel for him. I mean,
he lost all six of his children. Of his own
famous temper, he supposedly said quote, had I been numbered
amongst the calm, sedate, concentric men of the world, I should,
in all probability never have had such children as mine.
And I think that's an interesting point to start to
(27:49):
wrap this up on Mrs Gaskell's biography sort of wonders
what would Charlotte Bronte have been like if she had
been brought up in a healthy and happy situation. But
Mr Bronte's own words how much his personality likely shaped
his children, shows that it almost did seem to be
a requirement that they had this isolated upbringing, This unhealthy
(28:13):
atmosphere they lived in, and the development of their intense
imaginations almost came from that. It's also neat too. I
think that we rarely talk about our subjects in such
a broad view as this, But I read a New
Yorker article on the Bronte myth and noted that the
sisters have really been quote remolded in successive generations to
(28:35):
fit with different agendas, Freudian feminist agendas, and that's so
strange to me. It has been interesting to learn about
a biography and how that's connected to the writer's works,
but also how much these lives are open to interpretation.
(28:59):
Thank you so much for joining us for this Saturday classic.
Since this is out of the archive, if you heard
an email address or a Facebook U r L or
something similar during the course of the show, that may
be obsolete now. So here is our current contact information.
We are at History Podcast at how stuff Works dot com,
and then we're at Missed in the History all over
(29:19):
social media that is our name on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest,
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