which Charlotte made immortal merely annoyed her. The new impressions
which gave another scope to Charlotte’s vision were nothing to her.
All that was grand, remarkable, passionate, under the surface of
that conventional Pensionnat de Demoiselles, was invisible to Emily.
Notwithstanding her genius she was very hard and narrow. Poor girl,
she was sick for home.... Charlotte’s engrossment in her new life,
her eagerness to please her master, was a contemptible weakness to
the imbittered heart. She would laugh when she found her elder sister
trying to arrange her homely gowns in the French taste, and stalk
silently through the large school-rooms with a fierce satisfaction in
her own ugly sleeves, in the Haworth cut of her skirts. She seldom
spoke a word to any one; only sometimes she would argue with Monsieur
Héger, perhaps secretly glad to have the chance of shocking Charlotte.
If they went out to tea, she would sit still on her chair, answering
“Yes,” and “No;” inert, miserable, with a heart full of tears. When her
work was done she would walk in the Crossbowmen’s ancient garden, under
the trees, leaning on her shorter sister’s arm, pale, silent--a tall,
stooping figure.... Emily did indeed work hard. She was there to work,
and not till she had learned a certain amount would her conscience
permit her to return to Haworth. It was for dear liberty that she
worked. She began German, a favorite study in after years, and of some
purpose, since the style of Hoffman left its impression on the author
of ‘Wuthering Heights.’ She worked hard at music; and in half a year
the stumbling school-girl became a brilliant and proficient musician.
Her playing is said to have been singularly accurate, vivid, and full
of fire. French, too, both in grammar and literature, was a constant
study.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Emily at home during Charlotte’s second sojourn in Brussels.]
Emily was alone in the gray house, save for her secluded father and old
Tabby now over seventy. She was not unhappy. No life could be freer
than her own; it was she that disposed, she too that performed most
of the household work. She always got up first in the morning, and
did the roughest part of the day’s labor before frail old Tabby came
down; since kindness and thought for others were part of the nature
of this unsocial, rugged woman. She did the household ironing and
most of the cookery. She made the bread; and her bread was famous in
Haworth for its lightness and excellence. As she kneaded the dough,
she would glance now and then at an open book propped up before her.
It was her German lesson. But not always did she study out of books;
those who worked with her in that kitchen, young girls called in to
help in stress of business, remember how she would keep a scrap of
paper, a pencil, at her side, and how, when the moment came that she
could pause in her cooking or her ironing, she would jot down some
impatient thought and then resume her work. With these girls she was
always friendly and hearty--“pleasant, sometimes quite jovial, like a
boy,” “so genial and kind, a little masculine,” say my informants; but
of strangers she was exceedingly timid, and if the butcher’s boy or the
baker’s man came to the kitchen door, she would be off like a bird into
the hall or the parlor till she heard their hob-nails clumping down the
path. Not easy getting sight of that rare bird. Therefore, it may be,
the Haworth people thought more of her powers than of those of Anne or
Charlotte, who might be seen at school any Sunday. They say: “A deal of
folk thout her th’ clever’st o’ them a’, hasumiver shoo wur so timid,
shoo cudn’t frame to let it aat.”
A. MARY F. ROBINSON: ‘Emily Brontë.’
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Origin of the three-fold book of Poems.]
[Sidenote: Pseudonyms.]
One day in the autumn of 1845, I accidentally lighted on a MS. volume
of verse, in my sister Emily’s handwriting. Of course, I was not
surprised, knowing that she could and did write verse: I looked it
over, and something more than surprise seized me--a deep conviction
that these were not common effusions, nor at all like the poetry women
generally write. I thought them condensed and terse, vigorous and
genuine. To my ear they had also a peculiar music, wild, melancholy,
and elevating. My sister Emily was not a person of a demonstrative
character, nor one, on the recesses of whose mind and feelings, even
those nearest and dearest to her, could, with impunity, intrude
unlicensed: it took hours to reconcile her to the discovery I had
made, and days to persuade her that such poems merited publication....
Meantime, my younger sister quietly produced some of her own
compositions, intimating that since Emily’s had given me pleasure, I
might like to look at hers. I could not but be a partial judge, yet
I thought that these verses too had a sweet sincere pathos of their
own.... We agreed to arrange a small selection of our poems, and, if
possible, get them printed. Averse to personal publicity, we veiled
our own names under those of ‘Currer,’ ‘Ellis,’ and ‘Acton Bell’; the
ambiguous choice being dictated by a sort of conscientious scruple
at assuming Christian names positively masculine, while we did not
like to declare ourselves women, because,----without at the time
suspecting that our mode of writing and thinking was not what is called
“feminine,”--we had a vague impression that authoresses are likely to
be looked on with prejudice.
CHARLOTTE BRONTË: _Biographical Preface to_ ‘Wuthering Heights.’
London, 1850.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Evenings at Haworth novel-writing.]
The sisters retained the old habit, which was begun in their aunt’s
life-time, of putting away their work at nine o’clock, and beginning
their study, pacing up and down their sitting-room. At this time,
they talked over the stories they were engaged upon, and described
their plots. Once or twice a week, each read to the other what she had
written, and heard what they had to say about it. Charlotte told me,
that the remarks made had seldom any effect in inducing her to alter
her work, so possessed was she with the feeling that she had described
reality; but the readings were of great and stirring interest to all,
taking them out of the gnawing pressure of daily-recurring cares,
and setting them in a free place. It was on one of these occasions
that Charlotte determined to make her heroine plain, small, and
unattractive, in defiance of the accepted canon.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Charlotte’s firmness.]
The three tales, ‘Wuthering Heights,’ ‘Agnes Grey,’ and ‘The
Professor,’ had tried their fate in vain together; at length they were
sent forth separately, and for many months with still-continued ill
success. I have mentioned this here, because, among the dispiriting
circumstances connected with her anxious visit to Manchester, Charlotte
told me that her tale came back upon her hands, curtly rejected by
some publisher, on the very day when her father was to submit to
his operation [for cataract]. But she had the heart of Robert Bruce
within her, and failure upon failure daunted her no more than him.
Not only did ‘The Professor’ return again to try his chance among the
London publishers, but she began, in this time of care and depressing
inquietude--in those gray, weary, uniform streets where all faces, save
those of her kind doctor, were strange and untouched with sunlight to
her--there and then, did the brave genius begin ‘Jane Eyre.’
MRS. GASKELL: ‘Life of Charlotte Brontë.’
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Immediate success of ‘Jane Eyre.’]
Those who remember that winter [of 1847] know how something like
a ‘Jane Eyre’ fever raged among us. The story which had suddenly
discovered a glory in uncomeliness, a grandeur in overmastering
passion, moulded the fashion of the hour, and “Rochester airs” and
“Jane Eyre graces” became the rage. The book, and its fame and
influence, travelled beyond the seas with a speed which in those days
was marvellous. In sedate New England homes the history of the English
governess was read with an avidity which was not surpassed in London
itself, and within a few months of the publication of the novel it was
famous throughout two continents. No such triumph has been achieved
in our time by any other English author; nor can it be said, upon the
whole, that many triumphs have been better merited. It happened that
this anonymous story, bearing the unmistakable marks of an unpractised
hand, was put before the world at the very moment when another great
masterpiece of fiction was just beginning to gain the ear of the
English public. But at the moment of publication ‘Jane Eyre’ swept
past ‘Vanity Fair’ with a marvellous and impetuous speed which left
Thackeray’s work in the distant background; and its unknown author in a
few weeks gained a wider reputation than that which one of the master
minds of the century had been engaged for long years in building up.
The reaction from this exaggerated fame of course set in, and it was
sharp and severe.
T. WEMYSS REID: ‘Charlotte Brontë, a Monograph.’
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Mr. Brontë informed about ‘Jane Eyre.’]
The sisters had kept the knowledge of their literary ventures
from their father, fearing to increase their own anxieties and
disappointment by witnessing his.... Once, Charlotte told me, they
overheard the postman, meeting Mr. Brontë, as the latter was leaving
the house, and inquiring from the parson where one Currer Bell could
be living, to which Mr. Brontë replied that there was no such person in
the parish.... Now, however, when the demand for the work had assured
success to ‘Jane Eyre,’ her sisters urged Charlotte to tell their
father of its publication. She accordingly went into his study one
afternoon after his early dinner, carrying with her a copy of the book,
and one or two reviews, taking care to include a notice adverse to it.
She informed me that something like the following conversation took
place:
“Papa, I’ve been writing a book.”
“Have you, my dear?”
“Yes, and I want you to read it.”
“I am afraid it will try my eyes too much.”
“But it is not in manuscript: it is printed.”
“My dear! you’ve never thought of the expense it will be! It will be
almost sure to be a loss, for how can you get a book sold? No one knows
you or your name.”
“But, papa, I don’t think it will be a loss; no more will you, if you
will let me read you a review or two, and tell you more about it.”
So she sat down and read some of the reviews to her father; and then,
giving him the copy of ‘Jane Eyre’ that she intended for him, she left
him to read it. When he came in to tea, he said, “Girls, do you know
Charlotte has been writing a book, and it is much better than likely?”
MRS. GASKELL: ‘Life of Charlotte Brontë.’
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Charlotte’s subsequent portrait of Emily.]
Shirley [is] a fancy likeness of Emily Brontë. Emily Brontë, but
under very different conditions. No longer poor, no longer thwarted,
no longer acquainted with misery and menaced by untimely death; not
thus, but as a loving sister would fain have seen her, beautiful,
triumphant, the spoiled child of happy fortune. Yet in these altered
circumstances Shirley keeps her likeness to Charlotte’s hard-working
sister. Under the pathetic finery so lovingly bestowed, under the
borrowed splendors of a thousand a year, a lovely face, an ancestral
manor-house, we recognize our hardy and headstrong heroine, and smile
a little sadly at the inefficacy of this masquerade of grandeur, so
indifferent and unnecessary to her. Through these years we discern the
brilliant heiress to be a person of infinitely inferior importance to
the ill-dressed and over-worked vicar’s daughter.... Shirley is indeed
the exterior Emily, the Emily that was to be met and known thirty-five
years ago, only a little polished, with the angles a little smoothed,
by a sister’s anxious care. The nobler Emily, deeply suffering,
brooding, pitying, creating, is only to be found in a stray word here
and there, a chance memory, a happy answer, gathered from the pages of
her work, and the loving remembrance of her friends. But to know how
Emily Brontë looked, moved, sat and spoke, we still return to Shirley.
A host of corroborating memories start up in turning the pages. Who
but Emily was always accompanied by a “rather large, strong, and
fierce-looking dog, very ugly, being of a breed between a mastiff and a
bull-dog”? It is familiar to us as Una’s lion.
Certainly “Captain Keeldar,” with her cavalier airs, her ready disdain,
her love of independence, does bring back with vivid brilliance the
memory of our old acquaintance, “the Major,”[9]... We know her, too,
by her kindness to her inferiors. A hundred little stories throng our
minds. Unforgotten delicacies made with her own hands for her servant’s
friend, yet remembered visits of Martha’s little cousin to the kitchen,
where Miss Emily would bring in her own chair for the ailing girl;
anecdotes of her early rising through many years to do the hardest
work, because the first servant was too old, and the second too young
to get up so soon; and she, Emily, was so strong. A hundred little
sacrifices, dearer to remember than Shirley’s open purse, awaken in our
hearts and remind us that, after all, Emily was the nobler and more
lovable heroine of the twain.... And Shirley’s love of picturesque and
splendid raiment is not without an echo in our memories. It was Emily
who, shopping in Bradford with Charlotte and her friend, chose a white
stuff patterned with lilac thunder and lightning, to the scarcely
concealed horror of her more sober companions.... She, too, had
Shirley’s taste for the management of business.
A. MARY F. ROBINSON: ‘Emily Brontë.’
* * * * *
[Sidenote: “Keeper.”]
The same tawny bull-dog, called “Tartar” in ‘Shirley,’ was “Keeper”
in Haworth parsonage; a gift to Emily. With the gift came a warning.
Keeper was faithful to the depths of his nature as long as he was
with friends; but he who struck him with a stick or whip, roused the
relentless nature of the brute, who flew at his throat forthwith,
and held him there till one or the other was at the point of death.
Now Keeper’s household fault was this: He loved to steal up-stairs,
and stretch his square, tawny limbs on the comfortable beds, covered
over with delicate white counterpanes. But the cleanliness of the
parsonage arrangements was perfect; and this habit of Keeper’s was so
objectionable, that Emily in reply to Tabby’s remonstrances, declared
that, if he was found again transgressing, she herself, in defiance
of warning and his well-known ferocity of nature, would beat him so
severely that he would never offend again. In the gathering dusk of an
autumn evening, Tabby came, half triumphantly, half tremblingly, but in
great wrath, to tell Emily that Keeper was lying on the best bed, in
drowsy voluptuousness. Charlotte saw Emily’s whitening face, and set
mouth, but dared not speak to interfere: no one dared when Emily’s eyes
glowed in that manner out of the paleness of her face, and when her
lips were so compressed into stone. She went up-stairs, and Tabby and
Charlotte stood in the gloomy passage below, full of the dark shadows
of coming night. Down the stairs came Emily, dragging after her the
unwilling Keeper, his hind legs set in a heavy attitude of resistance,
held by the “scaft of his neck,” but growling low and savagely all the
time. The watchers would fain have spoken, but durst not, for fear of
taking off Emily’s attention, and causing her to avert her head for a
moment from the enraged brute. She let him go, planted in a dark corner
at the bottom of the stairs; no time was there to fetch stick or rod,
for fear of the strangling clutch at her throat--her bare clenched
fist struck against his red fierce eyes, before he had time to make
his spring, and in the language of the turf, she “punished him” till
his eyes were swelled up, and the half-blind, stupefied beast was led
to his accustomed lair, to have his swelled head fomented and cared
for by the very Emily herself. The generous dog owed her no grudge; he
loved her dearly ever after; he walked first among the mourners at her
funeral; he slept moaning for nights at the door of her empty room, and
never, so to speak, rejoiced, dog fashion, after her death.
MRS. GASKELL: ‘Life of Charlotte Brontë.’
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Emily saves Branwell’s life.]
At last [Branwell] grew ill, and would be content to go to bed early,
and lie there half-stupefied with opium and drink. One such night,
their father and Branwell being in bed, the sisters came up-stairs to
sleep. Emily had gone on first into the little passage room where she
still slept, when Charlotte, passing Branwell’s partly-opened door, saw
a strange bright flare inside. “Oh, Emily!” she cried, “the house is on
fire!”
Emily came out, her fingers at her lips. She had remembered her
father’s great horror of fire; it was the one dread of a brave man;
he would have no muslin curtains, no light dresses in his house. She
came out silently and saw the flame; then, very white and determined,
dashed from her room down stairs into the passage, where every night
full pails of water stood. One in each hand she came up-stairs. Anne,
Charlotte, the young servant, shrinking against the wall, huddled
together in amazed horror--Emily went straight on and entered the
blazing room. In a short while the bright light ceased to flare.
Fortunately the flame had not reached the woodwork; drunken Branwell,
turning in his bed, must have upset the light on to his sheets, for
they and the bed were all on fire, and he unconscious in the midst,
when Emily went in, even as Jane Eyre found Mr. Rochester. But it was
no reasonable, thankful human creature with whom Emily had to deal.
After a few long moments, those still standing in the passage saw her
stagger out, white, with singed clothes, half-carrying in her arms,
half-dragging, her besotted brother. She placed him in her bed, and
took away the light; then assuring the hysterical girls that there
could be no further danger, bade them go and rest--but where she slept
herself that night no one remembers now.
A. M. F. ROBINSON: ‘Emily Brontë.’
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Emily’s personal resemblance to G. H. Lewes.]
I have seen Lewes.... I could not feel otherwise to him than
half-sadly, half-tenderly--a queer word that last, but I use it
because the aspect of Lewes’s face almost moves me to tears; it is
so wonderfully like Emily--her eyes, her features, the very nose,
the somewhat prominent mouth, the forehead--even, at moments, the
expression.
CHARLOTTE BRONTË: _Letter_, 1850, quoted by Mrs. Gaskell.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Death of Emily Brontë.]
The days drew on towards Christmas; it was already the middle of
December, and still Emily was about the house, able to wait upon
herself, to sew for the others, to take an active share in the duties
of the day. She always fed the dogs herself. One Monday evening, it
must have been about the 14th of December, she rose as usual to give
the creatures their supper. She got up, walking slowly, holding out
in her thin hands an apronful of broken meat and bread. But when she
reached the flagged passage the cold took her; she staggered on the
uneven pavement and fell against the wall. Her sisters, who had been
sadly following her, unseen, came forward much alarmed and begged her
to desist; but, smiling wanly, she went on and gave Floss and Keeper
their last supper from her hands.
The next morning she was worse. Before her waking, her watching sisters
heard the low, unconscious moaning that tells of suffering continued
even in sleep; and they feared for what the coming year might hold in
store. Of the nearness of the end they did not dream. Charlotte had
been out to the moors, searching every glen and hollow for a sprig of
heather, however pale and dry, to take to the moor-loving sister. But
Emily looked on the flower laid on her pillow with indifferent eyes.
She was already estranged and alienated from life.
Nevertheless she persisted in rising, dressing herself alone, and doing
everything for herself. A fire had been lit in the room, and Emily sat
on the hearth to comb her hair. She was thinner than ever now--the
tall, loose-jointed, “slinky” girl--her hair in its plenteous dark
abundance was all of her that was not marked by the branding finger of
death. She sat on the hearth combing her long brown hair. But soon the
comb slipped from her feeble grasp into the cinders. She, the intrepid,
active Emily, watched it burn and smoulder, too weak to lift it.... At
last the servant came in: “Martha,” she said, “my comb’s down there; I
was too weak to stoop and pick it up.”
She finished her dressing, and came very slowly, with dizzy head and
tottering steps, down stairs into the little, bare parlor where Anne
was working and Charlotte writing a letter. Emily took up some work and
tried to sew. Her catching breath, her drawn and altered face, were
ominous of the end. But still a little hope flickered in those sisterly
hearts. “She grows daily weaker,” wrote Charlotte, on that memorable
Tuesday morning; seeing surely no portent that this--this! was to be
the last of the days and the hours of her weakness.
The morning grew on to noon, and Emily grew worse. She could no longer
speak, but--gasping in a husky whisper--she said: “If you will send for
a doctor, I will see him now!” Alas, it was too late. The shortness of
breath and rending pain increased; even Emily could no longer conceal
them. Towards two o’clock her sisters begged her, in an agony, to let
them put her to bed. “No, no,” she cried, tormented with the feverish
restlessness that comes before the last, most quiet peace. She tried to
rise, leaning with one hand upon the sofa. And thus the chord of life
snapped. She was dead.
She was twenty-nine years old.
They buried her, a few days after, under the church pavement; under
the slab of stone where the mother lay, and Maria and Elizabeth and
Branwell.... And though no wind ever rustles over the grave on which no
scented heather springs, nor any bilberry bears its sprigs of greenest
leaves and purple fruit, she will not miss them now; she who wondered
how any could imagine unquiet slumbers for them that sleep in the quiet
earth.
A. M. F. ROBINSON: ‘Emily Brontë.’
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Charlotte alone on the moors.]
“I am free to walk on the moors; but when I go out there alone,
everything reminds me of the times when others were with me, and
then the moors seem a wilderness, featureless, solitary, saddening.
My sister Emily had a particular love for them, and there is not a
knoll of heath, not a branch of fern, not a young bilberry-leaf,
not a fluttering lark or linnet, but reminds me of her. The distant
prospects were Anne’s delight, and when I look round, she is in the
blue tints, the pale mists, the waves and shadows of the horizon. In
the hill-country silence, their poetry comes by lines and stanzas into
my mind: once I loved it; now I dare not read it.”
CHARLOTTE BRONTË: _Letter_, quoted by Mrs. Gaskell.
* * * * *
Wearied out by the vividness of her sorrowful recollections, she sought
relief in long walks on the moors. A friend of hers gives an anecdote
which may well come in here.
[Sidenote: Anecdote of the old woman’s “cofe.”]
“They are mistaken in saying that she was too weak to roam the hills
for the benefit of the air. I do not think any one, certainly not any
woman in this locality, went so much on the moors as she did, when the
weather permitted. Indeed, she was so much in the habit of doing so,
that people, who live quite away on the edge of the common, knew her
perfectly well. I remember on one occasion an old woman saw her at a
little distance, and she called out ‘How! Miss Brontë! Hey yah (have
you) seen aught o’ my cofe (calf)?’ Miss Brontë told her she could
not say, for she did not know it. ‘Well!’ she said, ‘Yah know, it’s
getting up like nah (now), between a cah (cow) and a cofe--what we
call a stirk, yah know, Miss Brontë; will yah turn it this way if yah
happen to see’t, as yah’re going back, Miss Brontë; nah _do_, Miss
Brontë.’”
MRS. GASKELL: ‘Life of Charlotte Brontë.’
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Mrs. Gaskell’s first impression.]
A little lady in a black silk gown, whom I could not see at first for
the dazzle in the room; she came up and shook hands with me at once....
She is (as she calls herself) _undeveloped_, thin, and more than half a
head shorter than I am; soft brown hair, not very dark; eyes (very good
and expressive, looking straight and open at you), of the same color
as her hair; a large mouth; the forehead square, broad, and rather
overhanging. She has a very sweet voice; rather hesitates in choosing
her expressions, but when chosen they seem without an effort admirable,
and just befitting the occasion; there is nothing overstrained, but
perfectly simple.
MRS. GASKELL: _Letter_, published in ‘Life of Charlotte Brontë.’
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Charlotte at home.]
Miss Brontë put me in mind of her own ‘Jane Eyre.’ She looked smaller
than ever, and moved about so quietly and noiselessly, just like a
little bird, as Rochester called her, barring that all birds are
joyous, and that joy can never have entered that house since it was
first built.... There is something touching in the sight of that little
creature entombed in such a place, and moving about herself like a
spirit, especially when you think that the slight still frame encloses
a force of strong fiery life, which nothing has been able to freeze or
extinguish.
_Letter from a Visitor_: Quoted by Mrs. Gaskell.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: The Rev. Patrick Brontë.]
[Sidenote: Charlotte’s appearance and manner.]
[Sidenote: Her eyes.]