Charlotte and Emily
A Novel of the Brontës
by Jude Morgan
St. Martin’s Griffin,
384 pp., $14.99
What were you thinking, Miss Brontë?
This question has been at the heart of countless biographies of the sisters Brontë (Charlotte, Emily, and Anne) whose exquisite poems and stories—Charlotte’s Jane Eyre, Emily’s Wuthering Heights, and Anne’s Agnes Grey—helped pave the way for women writers and gothic romance. In Charlotte and Emily Jude Morgan diffuses any academic stuffiness around the Brontës by resurrecting flesh-and-blood women in the most appropriate forum: a novel full of familial rivalries, repressed sexuality, and, of course, darkness and death, all subjects closely associated with the Brontë brand.
From the beginning, a melancholic haze hovers above the Yorkshire household presided over by Patrick Brontë, a loving but conventional Irish clergyman whose views on women are challenged by the high ambitions of his high-strung daughters, most notably Charlotte, the chief protagonist here, who becomes “woman of the house” after the premature deaths of her mother and elder sisters. These early experiences with death provide inspiration for Charlotte’s fertile imagination, as well as her younger sister Emily’s chronic reclusiveness. That’s why we invent horror stories, says Charlotte, to take the edge off the real ones. Rounding out the family circle is the lone brother, Branwell, and the least known of the Brontë novelists, Anne, the most stable and sweet-natured of the clan.
It is better to be good than to be clever is the watchword instilled by their mother’s sister, who has moved in to help Patrick with the household, turning the girls’ nascent efforts at writing into secretive, guilt-ridden exercises. The peril is dreadful, warns Patrick, when Charlotte reveals her desire to write: There is temptation when it is a male hand that wields the pen; for women, who are by nature more vulnerable to the snare of morbid romancing, the temptation is most dangerous. Charlotte’s spirits are further depressed when she writes to the poet laureate of the day, Robert Southey, and receives in response the following admonition:
The “proper duty” of a young, unmarried woman in early 19th-century England was to take care of her parents or become a teacher or governess, which is what all three Brontë girls did, but without much success or enthusiasm for their charges. None of them seems able to hold down a job, but Charlotte and Emily secure a position at a boarding school in Brussels where they pick up languages and teach to pay their board. Here, finally, Charlotte meets her destiny—and readers of Jane Eyre will recognize Mr. Rochester’s alter ego, the older and urbanely sophisticated Monsieur Heger, who runs the school with his wife. Like Jane Eyre, Charlotte is in turmoil over her desire for a married employer whose personality is as inscrutable as her own. And monsieur’s own inner conflicts are prompted by the slightest stimulus—a sad anecdote, a stirred memory—which plunges him downward, groaning and bemoaning his lack of faith.
Jude Morgan’s polyphonic style, last employed in Passion (2005) about the women in the lives of Byron, Shelley, and Keats, allows him to speak in the voice of his female characters with clarity and empathy. His grasp of the psychology of women rings with particular resonance as Madame Heger speculates about Charlotte’s designs on her husband. Men often stumble about in a fog of intention, or move like sleepwalkers, she reasons; women know all too well what they are about.
In due course, Charlotte leaves the Hegers and rejoins Emily and Anne at the Brontë household, where their father is in declining health and their brother has succumbed to alcoholism in the wake of an ill-fated affair with an older, married woman named (no irony intended) Mrs. Robinson. Charlotte riffles through Emily’s papers and discovers unpublished manuscripts, much to Emily’s horror. The three band together and publish a collective book of verse under male pseudonyms (Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell), but the Bell brothers are no more successful than the Brontë sisters until the publication of Charlotte’s Jane Eyre (1847), which becomes an overnight success and catapults the sisters’ names into London literary circles.
Historical fiction doesn’t always work, especially when the subjects are writers themselves with well-known histories. But how wrong can you go when the protagonists are the authors of Villette and Wuthering Heights?
Stephanie Green is a writer in Washington.
