A Girl Walks Into a Book Read online

  Maria was the daughter of a prosperous Penzance merchant family. She met Patrick Brontë in 1812 at school in Rawdon, Yorkshire. He was a thirty-five-year-old autodidact, a curate, a poet, and the author of a fairly moralizing novel, The Maid of Killarny. He had changed his name from variously spelled versions of “Branty” to “Brontë” after leaving Ireland to enroll in St. John’s College in Cambridge in 1802. The shift camouflaged his Irishness, honored Lord Nelson, the Duke of Bronte, and looked better on paper. Patrick and Maria became engaged eight months after they met. Surviving letters from Maria reveal her to be a sweet and thoughtful woman, eager for Patrick’s guidance and companionship. At twenty-nine, having lost her parents a few years earlier, Maria was accustomed to a certain amount of independence and freedom; when she decided to marry, it was because she had found a man she respected and loved enough to allow him to guide her. She even calls him “My dear saucy Pat,” which is as embarrassing as any parental PDA.3 They married in December of 1812, settled into Patrick’s curacy in Hartshead, and proceeded to have six children.

  Their daughters Maria and Elizabeth were born in 1813 and 1815 (the same years Jane Austen published Pride and Prejudice and Emma, respectively). Charlotte was born in 1816, followed by Branwell, the only son and family pet, in 1817. Emily, strong-minded and antisocial, was born in 1818, and finally, in 1820, came Anne, the quiet, opinionated, and oft-forgotten. Shortly after Anne’s birth, the family moved to Haworth, a milltown near Keighley, where Patrick became the village curate. His responsibilities included giving sermons, performing ceremonies from baptisms to funerals, and generally maintaining the spiritual welfare of the populace. Haworth was small and industrial then, supported by weaving mills and those who worked in them. With the village church and graveyard at its highest point, the town spread down cobbled streets and narrow lanes lined with shops and houses into the Worth Valley. As a matter of fact it still does, though the mills are closed now and the Brontës are not merely residents, but the raison d’être of the town. It’s surrounded on all sides by glorious moors filled with heather and tall grasses and lush green fields crisscrossed by picturesque stone walls. When the Brontës lived there, trees hadn’t yet been planted near the church and the view was bleak in the gray autumn and winter, but a walk uphill in any direction would yield an incomparable view of the surrounding countryside.

  Contrary to lore that surrounds the Brontës and their Parsonage in the popular imagination, they weren’t in the middle of nowhere, their yard wasn’t desolate and windswept all year round, and they didn’t lack access to community resources. They attended local concerts, art exhibitions, and the Mechanics Institute, which hosted lectures and social events. True, the graveyard comes right up to the Parsonage garden, and 41 percent of children born in the village died before the age of six, but there was more to their lives than all-pervading death.4 The sooty grayness that covered the yellow stone of the small houses and shops was due to smoke from the mills, not from some inherent regional depression.

  Patrick was an astute, well-read, political thinker, and he embraced his children’s active imaginations and vociferous opinions. He read them newspapers, brought history to life through storytelling, and hired art and music teachers as the children became old enough. They were allowed to read whatever they wanted, from Aesop’s Fables and Arabian Nights to Edinburgh’s Blackwoods literary magazines. Patrick Brontë’s Gaskell-induced reputation as a hothead and a bully doesn’t seem entirely merited (and in fact was based on the testimony of one disgruntled servant). The bond between Charlotte and her father sustained them both in the wake of the losses that awaited the family; she was always willing to place Patrick’s welfare above her own.

  But then again, it’s possible he was harsh in his youth and mellowed with age—like my own father, who tended to explode with anger when frustrated by his children, his wife, or his work, but who also introduced me to much of the arts and culture that I still love as an adult. I could never stand up to his fury, but the happy times are unmatched. Maybe Patrick’s anger didn’t bother her as much. Maybe Charlotte’s coping mechanisms were more developed than mine. Maybe reports were exaggerated. We’ll never know.

  After giving birth to Anne, her fifth daughter, Maria Brontë began suffering symptoms of uterine cancer. She died in 1821, when her eldest was eight and Anne was only a year old. Maria’s unmarried sister, Elizabeth Branwell, came to live with the family and take care of the children. In July of 1824, the eldest Brontë daughters, Maria and Elizabeth, were sent to the Cowan Bridge School for Clergymen’s Daughters for a more formal education; Charlotte followed in August and Emily in November. They were taught English grammar and literature, geography, history, arithmetic, some natural sciences, and needlework. Thanks to poor ventilation and an inhospitable climate, both Maria and Elizabeth contracted consumptive illnesses and were quickly brought back home, where they died in May and June of 1825. Emily and Charlotte were called home immediately afterward, where they were educated by Aunt Branwell and Patrick alongside their younger brother and sister. This all sounds like it happened fast—a quick trip to school, a tragic loss, and a brisk ride home again. But think of childhood’s emotional calendar. The low moments seemed to last forever, and the bright moments flash like streetlamps outside a car window. Even if every other year of her life was full of curiosity and creativity, the trauma of losing two sisters soon after losing her mother must have intensely affected Charlotte, who was already so sensitive. She woke to find herself the eldest daughter instead of a sheltered third, responsible for her younger siblings as she’d never been before.

  In good weather, the Brontë children went to the moors behind the Parsonage and spent days walking and climbing, studying plants and animals, and telling stories together. Of the few images we have of the sisters, most are drawings or paintings they made of one another—Branwell’s grouping of the surviving four (which he later painted himself out of, leaving a chalky gray pillar in his place) is the most famous. I used to mock Branwell for the portrait’s ungainliness, until I saw it in person—he does capture something exciting in Charlotte’s eyes. By contrast, Charlotte’s watercolors are expressive and delicate, especially her botanicals.

  The storytelling “plays” that represent the Brontës’ earliest surviving written work may have begun before the deaths of Maria and Elizabeth, but they developed into nearly full-time occupations afterward. The sheer volume of the Brontës’ juvenilia proves the rumors of their sickly depressiveness as children must have been greatly exaggerated. They kept busy by creating richly layered imaginary worlds drawn from the books and magazines that filled the Parsonage. The impact of losing their mother shows up in their fiction, where the mothers are either missing, careless, reappearing after a long absence, or impossibly warm and generous.

  The Brontës first began recording their imaginative storytelling on paper in 1829, when Charlotte set down The History of the Year. In it, she recounts how she and her siblings had adopted their favorite characters from history, inspired by a set of Branwell’s toy soldiers they called The Twelve. Charlotte claimed the Duke of Wellington, Branwell took Napoleon Bonaparte, Emily chose “a very grave looking fellow” they called Gravey, and Anne’s was “a queer little thing very like herself” dubbed “waiting Boy.”5 They conscripted their tiny subjects into adventures both mundane and supernatural. Maybe that sounds weird, but let ye who never enjoyed mutant turtles named after Renaissance artists cast the first stone. They traveled to an imaginary Africa, established their own pretend nation-states, fought for and against their rulers, conducted courtly intrigues, and dabbled in romance. Within their imaginary kingdom of Glass Town, the sisters and Branwell ruled as Chief Genii or Little Queens and a Little King, and each had their own country to manage. The young Brontës also imagined themselves in a school superintended by the Duke of Wellington, who became Charlotte’s lifelong hero.

  When she was fourteen, Charlotte made a list of her work thus far in a littl
e document titled “Catalogue of my Books with the periods of their completion up to August 3, 1830.” You can go visit it in person at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York. Should you make an appointment online, after you’ve been signed in and admitted, the librarian will bring it over on two large plush triangular cushions, with weighted ropes gently draped across the pages to keep them open. When you’re ready to turn the page, you call for the librarian again, who brings over a small strip of paper with an angled point and generously allows you to turn the flimsy leaf yourself. The catalogue is the size of a half-sheet of paper, folded over again, with three of the four leaves filled by Charlotte’s assertive handwriting. She must have pinned the page down between thumb and forefinger to write on it. Her “&” symbols look like the incomplete figure-eights children use to represent fish. Screened from the librarian’s view by the book the catalogue was pasted into, you might dare to surreptitiously run your finger back and forth over Charlotte’s childish signature. On one side of the paper, lurking somewhere behind her words, way back in 1830, is Charlotte. On the other, you—or at least, I—sit, delighted. And awash in something else, too—an uncanny sense of recognition.

  When I was twelve or so, I would script elaborate military “missions” for my younger brother Thomas and I to act out. We’d mix our Ninja Turtles, our G.I. Joes, Barbies, Trolls, beanie babies, and Playmobil figures in kaleidoscopic undertakings that crossed space, time, and genre. But since he was only five, his limited literacy and inability to memorize elaborate orders left him wandering rudderless whenever I sent him off with maps and passwords. We switched to improvisation games, inspired by Whose Line Is It Anyway?, and sketch comedy from The Kids in the Hall and sanitized reruns of Saturday Night Live. The video evidence of this period that survives shows me brusquely coaching a kid who barely knew his alphabet through skits, tool-safety PSAs, mock ballroom dance competitions, and quiz shows (and frequently breaking the cardinal rule of responding with “yes, and…” to seize creative control). We made up songs on the walk home when I picked him up from school, and watched Monty Python and Mystery Science Theater 3000 until we could quote entire episodes from memory. Though we both lacked the attention to detail and manual dexterity to create tiny publications of our own, we fully inhabited this world we invented together. We still feel its impact—and not just in our incessant lapses into catchphrases and cackling. He started a public speaking club as an undergraduate using many of the skills we practiced together in our living room and backyard. I briefly wrote for a comedy clips show, and those improv techniques come in handy when I teach children and college students about writing and voice.

  There’s a lot of discussion these days about the merits and dangers of childhood vulnerability and adolescent missteps being preserved online, but I almost wish the juvenile ramblings of all the writers I love were still available, like these tiny works of art the Brontës left behind. Juvenilia gives us an opportunity to watch writers try out ideas in first one medium, then another, before making their more ambitious attempts in adulthood. For example, Charlotte’s The Professor developed out of a short story Branwell began as a teen, and Jane Eyre’s Edward Fairfax Rochester evolved from Charlotte’s Duke of Zamorna; they have a shared intensity of personality and tend toward arrogance. Knowing Charlotte fantasized about the same kind of dynamic hero from adolescence on unsettles the common perception that Rochester was entirely based on Constantin Heger, one of her teachers.

  Figure 2.2: Cover page of Charlotte’s Young Men’s Magazine, August 1830.

  PHOTO COURTESY OF THE BRONTË PARSONAGE MUSEUM.

  Branwell began writing a Young Men’s Magazine in 1830, based heavily on Blackwoods, with the same short essays, satire, political debate, dispatches from around the empire, poetry, and installments of novels. Charlotte eventually took over the magazine and maintained Branwell’s tiny bound-folio format for nearly two years. Her earliest surviving fiction reflects her interest in defying the constraints placed on her gender by society and literature—she frequently wrote as “Captain Tree” or “Charles Townshend,” even into early adulthood. She rarely wrote about traditional “feminine” issues found in ladies’ magazines. Instead she placed her characters in boisterous taverns, where they bickered about politics and demanded more venison. In the issues of Blackwoods she read as a child she would have encountered a constant barrage of sexism—“What if the Duke of Wellington were a Woman?” one essay asked before bemoaning the idea of pregnancy sabotaging the Battle of Waterloo; another scornfully derided the fledgling feminist efforts of “Bluestockings over the Border.” Writing as a boy allowed Charlotte to take freedoms she didn’t yet feel entitled to as an “authoress.” The agency she took for herself as a girl is probably a large part of what made her mature fiction even possible—to write so freely as an adult required years of practice in the grip of Branwell’s strong editorial style. Perhaps my brother has my domineering director’s approach to thank for the intensity and integrity of his arguing style now.

  Figure 2.3: Charlotte’s tiny books.

  PHOTO COURTESY OF THE BRONTË PARSONAGE MUSEUM.

  The Brontë magazines that the Parsonage Museum keeps today are two inches tall and an inch and a half wide, and though the script is decipherable, it often requires a magnifying glass to make out. Charlotte continued Branwell’s cunning tradition of making the font look as much like typeface as possible and imitating the composition of a Blackwoods title page all the way down to the seller’s information. They are hilarious, both for the precociousness of the authors and the straightforwardness of their delivery. My favorite “Conversation” dates from Charlotte’s tenure as editor and features an argument between Captain Tree, the Marquis of Douro (aka Lord Charles Wellesley), and “Stumps” during an evening of squabbles and roast meat. Charlotte reveals herself, irritable and funny, through her characters. Hearing her “voice” on the page as a young girl makes her relatable—not a refined, unreachable Author of Global Distinction and Renown, but just Charlotte, writing stories for her imaginary friends under made-up names, just like I did. Perhaps Charlotte never “became” a writer but just was one.

  The Brontës and I all embellished our make-believe with books we’d read and stories we’d heard, blurring the line between reality and art as we lived inside our creations even off the page. My grandfather built me a dollhouse for my fifth birthday, where I spent hours with the Williams family (parented by Vivian and Vance, named after a misread title card from I Love Lucy) and their household concerns. I rarely played out loud, preferring to narrate in my head where nobody could eavesdrop. I played with the dollhouse well into adolescence, and occasionally wrote out the stories belonging to its inhabitants, with atrocious attempts at dialect inspired by The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and dramatic twists drawn from soap operas and Shakespeare. After I read Noel Streatfeild’s Thursday’s Child, I often acted out mock-flights with my neighborhood friends through imaginary canals and alleyways, dodging orphanage matrons and scullery maids. I even inadvertently followed in the Brontës’ footsteps by curating a paper called The Pennington Post, assembled from articles and headlines clipped out of a fledgling local paper known as the Washington Post. I glued the newsprint excerpts onto ruled looseleaf, stapled them together, signed myself “editor-in-chief,” and sold them for $1.50 to anyone who would buy them. Ultimately the Brontë sisters’ debut collection of poems would outstrip my journalistic empire by just two copies. And they only sold two copies.

  Figure 2.4: “Morning,” from a Young Men’s Magazine.

  PHOTO COURTESY OF THE BRONTË PARSONAGE MUSEUM.

  And what of Emily and Anne? We know from references in their few surviving letters and diary papers that Emily and Anne were just as involved in storytelling and writing as their older brother and sister, but almost none of their juvenilia survives. In her work, Charlotte is both affectionate and mocking when she refers to characters and events in Emily and Anne’s kingdoms, as any older sister would be
. Their realm was called Gondal, and all that remains of it are poems written in character and lists of inhabitants, though they continued writing tales of its adventures well into adulthood. In fact, it was the separation from the security of this imaginary world that made living away from home so painful when they traveled to school or to work as governesses outside Haworth. The fantasies were portable, of course, but away from home, the Brontës lost the opportunity to collaborate with one another, the intimacy of family language, and the luxury of unsupervised free time. Charlotte apparently destroyed the Gondal Chronicles after the deaths of Emily and Anne, along with any in-progress manuscripts they may have had. It’s a tragedy for the Brontë voyeur who wants to read absolutely everything, especially since we can see such clear connections between the themes, characters, and style of the Brontë juvenilia and the more sophisticated prose of their adult work. But it’s also a gesture of fierce loyalty, which perpetually characterizes Charlotte’s stewardship of her sisters’ work, and her friendships generally.

  At fifteen, during her year at a Miss Wooler’s school in Roe Head, Charlotte befriended fellow classmates Ellen Nussey and Mary Taylor; her relationships with them, as well as with Margaret Wooler herself, would endure for the rest of her life. What became a twenty-year correspondence began very simply, formally, and a little prudishly. Her letters to Ellen are affectionate, even clingy, as they ponder important questions like whether it’s appropriate for boys and girls to dance together at village events, and how prominently love should figure in the decision to marry. Charlotte’s lamentations about Haworth’s isolation are another common theme. Notably missing is any hint that when Charlotte wasn’t writing to Ellen or teaching Sunday School, she was sending her imagination on fantastical adventures around the globe. It’s hard to believe this polite, conscientious student is the same mouthy teenage editor of Young Men’s Magazine, so fearless when it came to orchestrating bar brawls and dangerous adventures in foreign lands. From the earliest days of their friendship, Charlotte kept an essential part of herself completely hidden from Ellen and everyone else outside the family circle. Oh how I relate.