RANDOM JOTTINGS

I am a member of an on line reading group and we are currently reading the Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte.  I have not read this for a few years so was delighted when this choice came up and it is clear that I will not stick to the reading schedule (I find I can never do this) and will continue further than I should. There is something about the Bronte family that has always fascinated me ever since I read A Man of Sorrow, a biography of Patrick Bronte way back in the 60s when I was a mini-skirted library assistant in Highgate and one of our readers, a Bronte fan, recommended it to me and started my lifelong fascination with the inmates of Haworth Parsonage.

I know readers may wince, but I have to confess that I would rather have needles stuck in my eyes than read Wuthering Heights again (and yes, I know – extreme).  I agree it is powerful and stunning and all the adjectives and descriptions that scholars and more esteemed readers than I have given it, but I really dislike it intensely.   Out of Charlotte's works Jane Eyre is the one that pinned me to the wall when I first read it and I have lost count of the number of re-reads of this marvellous novel I have undertaken in my lifetime; Shirley I find a bit boring and rather uneven, a novel of three parts and none of them seem to flow. This is hardly surprising as she had to finish it while suffering the deaths of Branwell, Emily and Anne.   Villette is not a lovable book or as accessible as Jane but shows Charlotte at the height of her powers and though it is bleak and full of suffering and sorrow, and largely autobiographical, it is a magnificent work.  The Professor is very much Villette in embryo and suffers from being written from a man's viewpoint which was not totally convincing. It was turned down over and over again by various publishers until she put it to one side and it was reissued when she was famous.  Nothing new under the sun!

And so we come to Anne, the quiet sister, the self effacing sister, the one who is regarded as not being such a great writer as Emily and Charlotte, who seems to lurk in the shadow of her two elder siblings.  I have always felt that Anne was totally underestimated and unappreciated by the public who have based their viewpoint of her on Charlotte's own letters and portrayal of her as 'gentle Anne'.  Charlotte was such a passionate soul, her emotions seething and her frustrations tearing her apart under that governessy exterior. Just read the Gondal sagas and her heroes and heroines of the the juvenilia to see what feelings she was repressing for which her only outlet was in her writing.  She let her imagination go off the scale when she created Rochester, just the sort of man she wanted who would sweep her off her feet and to hell with convention.  She may have criticised Jane Austen and not understood her but Darcy comes from the same cloth as her creation and I am surprised she did not realise this.  Jane Eyre was regarded as a 'naughty' book and mothers kept it from their daughters; Wuthering Heights was deemed 'coarse and brutal' so it was good to have a 'good' sister to counterbalance this criticism.  But while all this was going on, Anne was quietly and with great determination getting on with her life.

Against the wishes of the entire family she decided to take a post as a governess.  Her experiences form the basis of Agnes Grey, a small book in length but searing in its portrayal of the family she went to live with and the dreadful behaviour of her charges.   She stuck it out for some time despite her father and sisters pleading with her to come home.  Later she took up another post with the Robinson family at Thorpe Green where she stayed for several years, to be joined later by Branwell who  was engaged as tutor to the sons of the family and then, allegedly, had an affair with his employer's wife resulting in scandal and disgrace.

Anne was stoic. She suffered as much as Charlotte and Emily when away from Haworth and working in uncongenial surroundings and with people she disliked, but unlike her two sisters she kept quiet and got on with it. Emily never lasted long away from her beloved moors and every time she tried she became ill and had to return.  When she and Charlotte went to Brussels the pattern repeated itself. A book has been written about Emily suggesting she could have been anorexic as she sickened and pined until she came home, but I think that she used this as a weapon to get her own way as she immediately recovered back safe in the Parsonage.  Charlotte raged against her pupils, particularly in Villette which is, as I have said, largely autobiographical and she had the added pain of falling in love with her teacher Paul Heger.  She stayed on in Belgium long after she should have returned and suffered the most appalling depression while she was there.

So Charlotte and Emily take centre stage and we know of their pain, anguish and misery from letters and writing. Not so with Anne and I do wonder sometimes if Charlotte spoke of Anne and her literary works in a somewhat slighting way because deep down she realised that her younger sister was, in fact, the strongest of them all.

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, about which I shall post when I have finished it, was the story of an abusive marriage to a drunken husband and Anne used Branwell's behaviour and appalling end as her model for Arthur Huntingdon.  Her family were not happy about this book and did not want it published but, as always, Anne stuck to her guns and Tenant was issued.   Critics have said it is clumsy and uneven but I disagree.  I know that the first and last sections are in the first person of Gilbert, a young farmer who persists in his attentions to Helen Huntingdown when she moves to Wildfell Hall with her young son and refuses to be rejected until she hands him her diary to explain her situation.  The majority of the novel is then Helen's narrative and it does come as a bit of a bump when we jump back to Gilbert towards the denouement. However, I think it is a wonderful book and the more I have read it the more I have appreciated it and I now have a huge admiration for Anne.  There has only been one biography about her, by Winifred Gerin, and that was written some time ago and perhaps we need a more updated one, but I do recommend the Brontes by Juliet Barker which is a magnificent piece of scholarship and cannot imagine there will be a better.

Even in death Anne was strong, full of fortitude, secure in her faith and determined to die without fuss and the least possible trouble to her family.  She went to Scarborough with Charlotte, knowing she would not return and not wanting her father to witness yet another death in the Parsonage.  Compare this with Emily who, quite frankly,  I sometimes want to shake for her so called bravery when dying when I think she was being plain selfish and an exhibitionist.  Others may weep at the thought of this strong woman staggering around the rooms clutching the furniture and refusing to see a doctor, thus ensuring the maximum amount of suffering for those who had to witness it all. Then the final collapse on the sofa and Charlotte rushing in with a piece of gorse from her beloved moors so she could smell it before she died.  Yes and call me cynical if you like, I don't mind.

Anne's death is so poignant.  She lay on a sofa in a room at the hotel and quietly passed away while a lunch party was taking place in the next room.  I find the contrast between these two events deeply sad and can never read of it without a lump in the throat. 

A letter from Charlotte: "A year ago – how a prophet warned me how I should stand in in June 1849, how stripped and bereaved – had he foretold the autumn, the winter, the spring of sickness and the suffering to be gone through, I should have thought this can never be endured. It is over, Branwell, Emily, Anne are gone like dreams, gone as Maria and Elilzabeth went twenty years ago. One by one I have watched them fall asleep  on my arm and closed their glazed eyes, I have seen them buried one by one and thus far, God has upheld me"

Charlotte then returned home and had to spend the winter alone in the front room at Haworth, with her father in his study, the grandfather clock ticking on the staircase and the endless silence.  If you read her letter describing her return and how she got through the first night, I defy you not to weep.   Charlotte revered Emily and almost ennobled her, but I do sometimes wonder if she did not realise the sure and certain strength emanating from her sober and seemingly serene younger sister until it had gone.

'I felt that the house was all silent, the rooms were all empty -I remembered where the three were laid, in what narrow dark dwellings, never were they to reappear on earth.  So the sense of desolation and bitterness took possession of me, that agony that was to be undergone and was not to be avoided came on.  The great trial is when night approaches – at that hour we used to assemble in the dining room …now I sit by myself.  I cannot help thinking of their last days and their suffering – perhaps all this will become less poignant in time.   I dream of them and cannot recall them as they were in health. My nights were worse after the first shock of Branwell's death, they were terrible then and the impressions experienced on waking were at that time such as we do not put into language.  Worse seemed at hand than was yet endured – in truth worst awaited us'

New editions of Agnes Grey and the Tenant of Wildfell Hall have just been issued by Oxford University Press in their lovely new formats, ditto a selection of Charlotte's Letters.  These were reviewed last week in the Daily Mail under the heading Retro Reads.  I kid you not. Obviously the word Classic would be too much for some people it seems…..