History Tuesday: Charlotte Bronte

"God pardon me! And man meddle not with me: I have her, and will hold her."-Edward Rochester, Jane Eyre

If you are anything like me, you have at some point found yourself enraptured in the pages of Jane Eyre. You've cried with Jane, loved Mr. Rochester, and hated him at the same time. You've been held captive by the haunting, romantic, tragic tale at every turn of the page. 

I've read Jane Eyre so many times that my faithful copy of the story is starting to fall apart. The first time I read it, I was doubtful. Don't get me wrong, I was a fan of Victorian era love stories as much as the next girl, (Lord knows, I've read Pride and Prejudice too many times to count), but Jane Eyre seemed waaaaaaaay too long for a love story. I thought it would probably be kind of boring.

Of course, after I finished reading it the first time, I immediately flipped back to the beginning and started reading it again. 

After reading the story so many times, (I don't know how many, I lost count over a year ago), I started to think about the author. I don't know if other people do this, but when I enjoy a story, I dive in and read the story hundreds of times. Once I know the story by heart and can quote insanely long sections of it, I start to analyze the author, who, in the case of Jane Eyre is Charlotte Bronte.

Charlotte Bronte was the third of six children born to Maria and Patrick Bronte. She was born on April 21, 1816. Born in Thornton, Yorkshire she was the oldest of the three Bronte girls who survived all the way into adulthood.

In 1820, the Bronte family moved to Haworth. There, her father, who was an Irish Anglican clergyman, was appointed as Perpetual Curate of Saint Michael and All Angels Church. 

A year later, on the 15th of September, Charlotte's mother died, leaving five daughters, Maria, Elizabeth, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne, and one son, Branwell, to be taken care of by their aunt, Elizabeth Branwell.

In 1824, Charlotte, Emily, Maria, and Elizabeth were sent by their father to the Clergy Daughters' school at Cowan Bridge.

Charlotte always believed that her stay at this school permanently affected her health, and most likely is what brought two of her sister's to their early demise.

In the Spring of 1825, a typhoid epidemic swept through the school, causing many of the students to leave. This was no doubt Charlotte's inspiration for the epidemic at Lowood, the school that Jane Eyre is forced to attend.

Maria Bronte, a delicate, quiet, solemn soul, who was no doubt Charlotte's inspiration for Helen Burns, died on May 6, 1825 due to the school's epidemic. She was only 12.

Elizabeth Bronte also died during this epidemic, on the 25th of June, the same year as Maria.

After the two deaths, Mr. Bronte took Jane and Emily out of the school.

Back at home, Charlotte acted as a motherly figure for her remaining sisters, as she was now the oldest girl.

The Bronte children began to fill their spare time with creating detailed imaginary worlds and chronicling their histories. 

Charlotte and Branwell wrote stories about their imaginary world, Angria, while Emily and Anne wrote about Gondal. The stories came in partial manuscripts, but it prepared the children for the writing careers they would later have.

Between 1831 and 1832 Charlotte went to continue her education at Roe Head in Mirifield. Here, she met her lifelong friends, Ellen Nussey and Mary Taylor.

In 1833, Charlotte wrote her first novella, called The Green Dwarf, using the pen-name, Wellesley.

When she returned to Roe Head later, it was as a teacher. This lasted from 1835 to 1838. In 1839, Charlotte got the first of her many jobs as a governess, which was a career she continues to pursue until 1841.

From May until July of 1839, Charlotte was employed by the Sidwick family at their summer home in Lothersdale. One of the children in that family was named John Benson Sidwick. John was apparently kind of a brat, and once threw a bible at Charlotte, which was probably her inspiration for John Reed, the beastly child who threw a book at Jane Eyre's head.

In 1842, Charlotte and Emily moved to Brussels where they enrolled at a boarding school run by Constantin Heger, and his wife, Clair Zoe Heger. 

Instead of paying for a room and tuition, Charlotte taught English and Emily taught music at the school.

The time that they spent there was cut short when they received news their aunt, Elizabeth Branwell, died in October of 1842.

In January of the following year however, Charlotte returned to the school without her sister. Her time was not a happy one though, as she spent most of her time homesick.

Also, during her second stay, Charlotte fell in love with Constantin Heger, but as Constantin was a married man, she was forced to only love him from afar. 

She returned home in January 1843. Her time was not entirely wasted at school though, as she used many of the experiences there as fuel for her writings The Professor and Villette.

Apparently, at some point, about 2 years or so after they met, Charlotte sent love letters to Mr. Heger, who was bothered by them and shredded them and threw them away.

For some reason, Mrs. Heger got the love letters out of the trash, sewed them back together, and kept them preserved. The full extent of these letters were not revealed until 1913 when their contents were published for the general public.

May of 1846 saw the first publication by the Bronte sisters. Charlotte, Emily, and Anne decided to self publish a collaboration of their poetry, going under the fake names of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. 

The sisters thought it would be better to go under pen-names (although they still kept their initials even with the false names) because, as Charlotte said "[they] had a vague impression that authoresses [were] liable to be looked on with prejudice".

Only two copies of the poetry book were sold, the sisters spirits apparently did not sink too low, because despite everything, they all began working on their first novels and sending their work in to publishers, still going under the false names.

Charlotte's first story, The Professor was not as big a hit as she had no doubt hoped. While she had no publisher yet, Charlotte was encouraged by a letter from Smith, Elder &Co, who expressed an interest in any longer stories by Currer Bell.

Charlotte took up her pen and sent a second manuscript in August of 1847. Six weeks later, and the world saw the first copies of Jane Eyre. 

It was an instant success. The story received praise from critics, who thought the book was "an utterance from the depths of a struggling, suffering, much-enduring spirit".

Because the book was written from an extremely female perspective, it was kind of ground breaking. And of course, there was much speculation as to who Currer Bell really was. A lot of people believed it was a woman, which changed the general view of the book to coarse. Of course, had the book been written by a man, the public's opinion may not have been so harsh, because, for some reason, it's more acceptable by society (then and now I'm afraid) for a man to be vulgar and a bit harsh than a woman.

The speculation heightened with the publication of Wuthering Heights by Ellis Bell, and Agnes Grey by Acton Bell. 

The sales of the book continued to stayed strong anyway though, possibly because it seemed a bit more scandalous that a woman wrote it, and everyone loves a good scandal now and again. 

After the extreme success of Jane Eyre, Charlotte decided to write another book, entitled Shirley.

However, Charlotte was not able to immediately finish this story. Her writing was delayed as one tragedy after another struck the Bronte family.

September 1848 saw the first tragedy: the death of Branwell, Charlotte's only brother. He died because of chronic bronchitis which was made worse by his heavy drinking habits. Charlotte always believed his death was actually due to tuberculosis and didn't believe the official story. Branwell was suspected to be addicted to opium.

Shortly after Branwell's funeral, Emily fell ill and died of pulmonary tuberculosis in December of that year. The same disease claimed Anne's life the following May.

During this time, Shirley was tucked away, gathering dust. After Anne's death, Charlotte brought the manuscript back out and buried herself in it, as a way to deal with her tragic losses. Shirley was published in October of 1849.

Because this story was written in 3rd person, there was not quite as much raw, extremely personal emotion coming from the pages, so reviewers didn't find the story quite as gripping as it predecessor.

Because her novels were so successful, Charlotte's publishers convinced her to reveal her true identity and travel to London more often. She began to be accepted into higher ranking circles, and became friends with several higher ranking people in London society, including Harriet Marineau and Elizabeth Gaskell. She maintained an acquaintance also with William Thackeray, who's daughter, Anne, found Charlotte a lot more boring while at a party than she expected.

While Charlotte never had a close friendship with Elizabeth Gaskell, it would later be Gaskell who would write Charlotte's biography after she died.

Charlotte's third novel, and the final one published during her life time, was called Villette. In this one, Charlotte went back to writing in first person, as she had done with Jane Eyre, as well as using personal experiences again. This time, she used how she had felt about Mr. Heger, telling the story of a woman named Lucy Snowe, who fell in love with a man that she shouldn't be in love with. 

The critiques said of this one that it was a potent and sophisticated piece of work, although it was highly criticized for being coarse and not being very feminine in the portrayal of Lucy's dreams and desires.

On December 13th, 1852, before Villette was published, Charlotte had received a marriage proposal from Arthur Bell Nicholls, who had been her father's curate, and in love with Charlotte for a very long time. It had been Arthur's middle name that Charlotte and her sisters had used as their fake last names.

Charlotte's father, Patrick, refused to let Arthur marry his daughter, saying that a poor Irish curate should know better than to even ask for his famous daughter's hand.

In 1853, Arthur announced his plan to head for Australia as a missionary. Charlotte convinced him not to go, telling him that she was not insensitive towards his passion for her. 

While he didn't go to Australia, he was banished from the parish and had to go and work at another, during which time he had several secret meetings with Charlotte, who, during this time, began to fall in love with Arthur.

When her father discovered how determined she was to love Arthur, he relented to them seeing each other (not like he had been able to stop them before), and the two were married in June.

Not long after their wedding, Charlotte became pregnant. I imagine that she was very excited and insanely overjoyed, as she was in her late 30s. She probably had begun to give up ever getting married or having children of her own.

However, the joy that the couple had over this joyous news was cut short.

Charlotte had severe morning sickness the whole time she was pregnant, making her throw up all the time. A lot of modern researchers think that she probably got dehydrated from all the vomiting, or perhaps malnourished. Some say she caught typhus from one of the oldest of the Bronte's servants.

Either way, Charlotte died, along with her unborn child, on March 31st, 1855. Charlotte was only 38.

After Charlotte's death, the first novel she ever wrote, The Professor was published. A partial story was also published, and has since been finished by two more modern authors, the most popular being Emma Brown: A novel from the Unfinished Manuscript of Charlotte Bronte by Clare Boylan.

Charlotte Bronte lived a life filled with tragedy, as we all do. Nobody is safe from the icy fingers of death, nobody can run from tragedy forever. The difference between Charlotte, however, and the rest of us, is that she turned her deeply felt emotions into gripping narratives. Instead of wasting away from the constant deaths in her family, from the rejection from a love that she should not have felt, she used her words to tell the world the now very famous tales of the tragic women she wrote about.

Charlotte was one of those souls who's life has a dramatic twist that not many people could handle. If our lives came in colors, her life would be varying shades of black and dark red, but streaked with moments of pure gold. 

It's not that her life was full tragedy, but it was full imagination and adventure, in a way that not many people experience. As a child, she created a universe to live in, a universe where she was God, and the lives of the people living there were hers to control. As she grew older, she moved into the realm of writing about the real world, but with her own imaginative twist, drawing from her own experience, and from the deep well of her imagination. The world she was writing about may have been a real thing, but the characters, the emotions, the life and death, all were hers to control.

As a writer, and also as someone who created universes as a child, I can say that the power of controlling things like that gives you a sense of adventure like no other. 

Of course, I'm sure that Charlotte got lonely sometimes. She had her siblings, but after a while, even they left her, and she had only the fictional people she created. She no doubt longed for a man to love her, which made the passionate love that Arthur felt for her all the more beautiful. Even though they were unable to live happily for a very long time together, the short time they spent was no doubt some of the happiest moments of Charlotte's life. 

Even her death is one that seems like something devised in a fairy tale. The fact that she and her unborn child died together adds to the mysterious tragedy that was Charlotte's life.

In the end, looking back at the incredible woman who wrote such fantastically amazing stories, it almost seems as if her life was written by the same hand who wrote the plots to her stories. She has that fairy tale-like feeling, making her like a Queen of her own unique universe.

Even now, all these years later, Charlotte's narratives capture the hearts of readers young and old alike. Charlotte's stories will likely last hundreds of years more, capturing the attentions and hearts of thousands more. 

    

 I think Charlotte can be an inspiration to us all. We don't have to let tragedy overcome us, but instead we can flourish, as she did, in the face of adversity.

By the way, sorry guys that is took so long to write this one. There was a lot of information to go over and I've been pretty busy. Thanks for being so patient with me. Love you all!!

And also, sorry that this whole thing sounds like...well sounds like I've been reading Charlotte Bronte...which I have.

Cheers!