Harold Bloom - Bloom's Modern Critical Views - The Brontës

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Bloom’s Modern Critical Views
The Brontës
New Edition
Edited and with an introduction by

Harold Bloom
Sterling Professor of the Humanities
Yale University
Editorial Consultant, Susan Carlson
Bloom’s Modern Critical Views: The Brontës—New Edition

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Introduction ©2009 by Harold Bloom
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The Brontës / edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom.—New ed.

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Contents
Editor’s Note vii
Introduction 1
Harold Bloom
Slavery: Idée Fixe of Emily and Charlotte Brontë 13

Humphrey Gawthrop
“Escaping the body’s gaol”: The Poetry of Anne Bronte 25

Alexandra Leach
“Almost my hope of heaven”: Idolatry and Messianic

Symbolism in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre 35
Essaka Joshua
Macauley’s “Imperishable Empire” and “Nelly, I Am

Heathcliffe” in Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights 61
K. C. Belliappa
Monsieur Heger: Critic or Catalyst

in the Life of Charlotte Brontë? 67
Rebecca Fraser
The Brontës: Gothic Transgressor as Cattle Drover 79

James Reaney
Abuse, Silence, and Solitude in

Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall 91
Meghan Bullock
vi Contents
Shakespeare and the Brontës 101

Paul Edmondson
In Defence of Madame Beck 121

Birgitta Berglund
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall: What Anne Brontë

Knew and What Modern Readers Don’t 157
Joan Bellamy
Charlotte Brontë, Jane Austen,

and the Meaning of Love 161
Susan Ostrov Weisser
Anne Lister and Lesbian Desire

in Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley 171
Anne Longmuir
“Addresses from the Land

of the Dead”: Emily Brontë and Shelley 185
Patsy Stoneman
Chronology 199
Contributors 203
Bibliography 205
Acknowledgments 209
Index 211
Editor’s Note
My Introduction considers Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights as northern

romances, each obsessed with the myth and personality of George Gordon,
Lord Byron.
Humphrey Gawthrop rather problematically traces what he regards as
the displaced theme of black slavery in Emily and Charlotte Brontë, after
which Alexandra Leach reflects on the justly neglected poetry of Anne
Brontë.
The strange religious imagery of Jane Eyre’s close is studied by Joshua
Essaka, while Rebecca Fraser praised the effect of her Belgian teacher, Heger,
upon the young Charlotte Brontë.
James Reamy takes us back to the Gothic element in the childhood
writings of the Brontës, after which Meghan Bullock and later Joan Bellamy
examine Anne’s best novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.
Shakespearean allusions in the Brontës are analyzed by Paul Edmondson,
while the question of love in Charlotte Brontë is contrasted with its treatment
by Jane Austen by Susan Ostrov Weisser.
In this volume’s final essay, Patsy Stevenson interestingly considers the
effects of Shelley’s life and poetry upon Wuthering Heights.
vii
H arold B loom
Introduction
The Bron t ës
T he three Brontë sisters—Charlotte, Emily Jane, and Anne—are unique

literary artists whose works resemble one another’s far more than they do the
works of writers before or since. Charlotte’s compelling novel Jane Eyre and
her three lesser yet strong narratives—The Professor, Shirley, Villette—form
the most extensive achievement of the sisters, but critics and common read-
ers alike set even higher the one novel of Emily Jane’s, Wuthering Heights,
and a handful of her lyrical poems. Anne’s two novels— Agnes Grey and The
Tenant of Wildfell Hall—remain highly readable, although dwarfed by Jane
Eyre and the authentically sublime Wuthering Heights.
Between them, the Brontës can be said to have invented a relatively
new genre, a kind of northern romance, deeply influenced both by Byron’s
poetry and by his myth and personality, but going back also, more remotely
yet as definitely, to the Gothic novel and to the Elizabethan drama. In a
definite, if difficult to establish sense, the heirs of the Brontës include Thomas
Hardy and D.H. Lawrence. There is a harsh vitalism in the Brontës that finds
its match in the Lawrence of The Rainbow and Women in Love, though the
comparison is rendered problematic by Lawrence’s moral zeal, enchantingly
absent from the Brontës’ literary cosmos.
The aesthetic puzzle of the Brontës has less to do with the mature
transformations of their vision of Byron into Rochester and Heathcliff,
than with their earlier fantasy-life and its literature, and the relation of
that life and literature to its hero and precursor, George Gordon, Lord

Harold Bloom
Byron. At his rare worst and silliest, Byron has nothing like this scene
from Charlotte Brontë’s “Caroline Vernon,” where Caroline confronts the
Byronic Duke of Zamorna:
The Duke spoke again in a single blunt and almost coarse sen-
tence, compressing what remained to be said, “If I were a bearded
Turk, Caroline, I would take you to my harem.” His deep voice as
he uttered this, his high featured face, and dark, large eye burning
bright with a spark from the depths of Gehenna, struck Caroline
Vernon with a thrill of nameless dread. Here he was, the man
Montmorency had described to her. All at once she knew him.
Her guardian was gone, something terrible sat in his place.
Byron died his more-or-less heroic death at Missolonghi in Greece on April

19, 1824, aged thirty-six years and three months, after having set an impos-
sible paradigm for authors that has become what the late Nelson Algren
called “Hemingway all the way,” in a mode later exploited by Norman
Mailer, Gore Vidal, and some of their peers. Charlotte was eight, Emily
Jane six, and Anne four when the Noble Lord died and when his cult gor-
geously flowered, dominating their girlhood and their young womanhood.
Byron’s passive-aggressive sexuality—at once sadomasochistic, homo-
erotic, incestuous, and ambivalently narcissistic—clearly sets the pattern
for the ambiguously erotic universes of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights.
What Schopenhauer named (and deplored) as the Will to Live, and Freud
subsequently posited as the domain of the drives, is the cosmos of the
Brontës, as it would come to be of Hardy and Lawrence. Byron rather than
Schopenhauer is the source of the Brontës’ vision of the Will to Live, but the
Brontës add to Byron what his inverted Calvinism only partly accepted, the
Protestant will proper, a heroic zest to assert one’s own election, one’s place
in the hierarchy of souls.
Jane Eyre and Catherine Earnshaw do not fit into the grand array of
heroines of the Protestant will that commences with Richardson’s Clarissa
Harlowe and goes through Austen’s Emma Woodhouse and Fanny Price
to triumph in George Eliot’s Dorothea Brooke and Henry James’s Isabel
Archer. They are simply too wild and Byronic, too High Romantic, to keep
such company. But we can see them with Hardy’s Tess and, even more, his
Eustacia Vye, and with Lawrence’s Gudrun and Ursula. Their version of the
Protestant will stems from the Romantic reading of Milton, but largely in its
Byronic dramatization, rather than its more dialectical and subtle analyses in
Blake and Shelley, and its more normative condemnation in Coleridge and in
the Wordsworth of The Borderers.
Introduction
Jane E yr e
The Byronism of Rochester in Jane Eyre is enhanced because the narrative

is related in the first person by Jane Eyre herself, who is very much an overt
surrogate for Charlotte Brontë. As Rochester remarks, Jane is indomitable;
as Jane says, she is altogether “a free human being with an independent will.”
That will is fiercest in its passion for Rochester, undoubtedly because the pas-
sion for her crucial precursor is doubly ambivalent; Byron is both the literary
father to a strong daughter, and the idealized object of her erotic drive. To Jane,
Rochester’s first appearance is associated not only with the animal intensities
of his horse and dog, but with the first of his maimings. When Jane reclaims
him at the novel’s conclusion, he is left partly blinded and partly crippled. I do
not think that we are to apply the Freudian reduction that Rochester has been
somehow castrated, even symbolically, nor need we think of him as a sacrificed
Samson figure, despite the author’s allusions to Milton’s Samson Agonistes. But
certainly he has been rendered dependent upon Jane, and he has been tamed
into domestic virtue and pious sentiment, in what I am afraid must be regarded
as Charlotte Brontë’s vengeance upon Byron. Even as Jane Eyre cannot coun-
tenance a sense of being in any way inferior to anyone whatsoever, Charlotte
Brontë could not allow Byron to be forever beyond her. She could acknowl-
edge, with fine generosity, “that I regard Mr. Thackeray as the first of modern
masters, and as the legitimate high priest of Truth; I study him accordingly
with reverence.” But Vanity Fair is hardly the seedbed of Jane Eyre, and the
amiable and urbane Thackeray was not exactly a prototype for Rochester.
Charlotte Brontë, having properly disciplined Rochester, forgave him
his Byronic past, as in some comments upon him in one of her letters (to
W. S. Williams, August 14, 1848):
Mr. Rochester has a thoughtful nature and a very feeling heart; he

is neither selfish nor self-indulgent; he is ill-educated, misguided;
errs, when he does err, through rashness and inexperience: he
lives for a time as too many other men live, but being radically
better than most men, he does not like that degraded life, and is
never happy in it. He is taught the severe lessons of experience
and has sense to learn wisdom from them. Years improve him; the
effervescence of youth foamed away, what is really good in him
still remains. His nature is like wine of a good vintage, time can-
not sour, but only mellows him. Such at least was the character I
meant to portray.
Poor Rochester! If that constituted an accurate critical summary, then who

would want to read the novel? It will hardly endear me to feminist critics
Harold Bloom
if I observe that much of the literary power of Jane Eyre results from its
authentic sadism in representing the very masculine Rochester as a victim
of Charlotte Brontë’s will-to-power over the beautiful Lord Byron. I partly
dissent, with respect, from the judgment in this regard of our best feminist
critics, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar:
It seems not to have been primarily the coarseness and sexuality of

Jane Eyre which shocked Victorian reviewers . . . but . . . its “anti-
Christian” refusal to accept the forms, customs, and standards of
society—in short, its rebellious feminism. They were disturbed
not so much by the proud Byronic sexual energy of Rochester as
by the Byronic pride and passion of Jane herself.
Byronic passion, being an ambiguous entity, is legitimately present in

Jane herself as a psychosexual aggressivity turned both against the self and
against others. Charlotte Brontë, in a mode between those of Schopenhauer
and Freud, knows implicitly that Jane Eyre’s drive to acknowledge no
superior to herself is precisely on the frontier between the psychical and the
physical. Rochester is the outward realm that must be internalized, and Jane’s
introjection of him does not leave him wholly intact. Gilbert and Gubar
shrewdly observe that Rochester’s extensive sexual experience is almost the
final respect in which Jane is not his equal, but they doubtless would agree
that Jane’s sexual imagination overmatches his, at least implicitly. After all,
she has every advantage, because she tells the story, and very aggressively
indeed. Few novels match this one in the author’s will-to-power over her
reader. “Reader!” Jane keeps crying out, and then she exuberantly cudgels that
reader into the way things are, as far as she is concerned. Is that battered
reader a man or a woman?
I tend to agree with Sylvère Monod’s judgment that “Charlotte Brontë
is thus led to bully her reader because she distrusts him … he is a vapid,
conventional creature, clearly deserving no more than he is given.” Certainly
he is less deserving than the charmingly wicked and Byronic Rochester, who
is given a lot more punishment than he deserves. I verge upon saying that
Charlotte Brontë exploits the masochism of her male readers, and I may as
well say it, because much of Jane Eyre’s rather nasty power as a novel depends
upon its author’s attitude towards men, which is nobly sadistic as befits a
disciple of Byron.
“But what about female readers?” someone might object, and they might
add: “What about Rochester’s own rather nasty power? Surely he could not
have gotten away with his behavior had he not been a man and well-financed
to boot?” But is Rochester a man? Does he not share in the full ambiguity of
Byron’s multivalent sexual identities? And is Jane Eyre a woman? Is Byron’s
Introduction
Don Juan a man? The nuances of gender, within literary representation, are more
bewildering even than they are in the bedroom. If Freud was right when he
reminded us that there are never two in a bed, but a motley crowd of forebears as
well, how much truer this becomes in literary romance than in family romance.
Jane Eyre, like Wuthering Heights, is after all a romance, however northern,
and not a novel, properly speaking. Its standards of representation have more
to do with Jacobean melodrama and Gothic fiction than with George Eliot
and Thackeray, and more even with Byron’s Lara and Manfred than with any
other works. Rochester is no Heathcliff; he lives in a social reality in which
Heathcliff would be an intruder even if Heathcliff cared for social realities
except as fields in which to take revenge. Yet there is a daemon in Rochester.
Heathcliff is almost nothing but daemonic, and Rochester has enough of
the daemonic to call into question any current feminist reading of Jane Eyre.
Consider the pragmatic close of the book, which is Jane’s extraordinary
account of her wedded bliss:
I have now been married ten years. I know what it is to live entirely
for and with what I love best on earth. I hold myself supremely
blest—blest beyond what language can express; because I am my
husband’s life as fully as he is mine. No woman was ever nearer
to her mate than I am; ever more absolutely bone of his bone and
flesh of his flesh.
I know no weariness of my Edward’s society: he knows none of
mine, any more than we each do of the pulsation of the heart that
beats in our separate bosoms; consequently, we are ever together.
To be together is for us to be at once as free as in solitude, as gay as
in company. We talk, I believe, all day long: to talk to each other is
but a more animated and an audible thinking. All my confidence
is bestowed on him, all his confidence is devoted to me; we are
precisely suited in character—perfect concord is the result.
Mr. Rochester continued blind the first two years of our union:
perhaps it was that circumstance that drew us so very near—that
knit us so very close! for I was then his vision, as I am still his right
hand. Literally, I was (what he often called me) the apple of his eye.
He saw nature—he saw books through me; and never did I weary of
gazing for his behalf, and of putting into words the effect of field,
tree, town, river, cloud, sunbeam—of the landscape before us; of
the weather round us—and impressing by sound on his ear what
light could no longer stamp on his eye. Never did I weary of read-
ing to him: never did I weary of conducting him where he wished
to go: of doing for him what he wished to be done. And there was
a pleasure in my services, most full, most exquisite, even though
Harold Bloom
sad—because he claimed these services without painful shame

or damping humiliation. He loved me so truly that he knew no
reluctance in profiting by my attendance: he felt I loved him so
fondly that to yield that attendance was to indulge my sweetest
wishes.
What are we to make of Charlotte Brontë’s strenuous literalization of Gen.

2:23, her astonishing “ever more absolutely bone of his bone and flesh of
his flesh”? Is that feminism? And what precisely is that “pleasure in my
services, most full, most exquisite, even though sad”? In her “Farewell to
Angria” (the world of her early fantasies), Charlotte Brontë asserted that
“the mind would cease from excitement and turn now to a cooler region.”
Perhaps that cooler region was found in Shirley or in Villette, but fortunately
it was not discovered in Jane Eyre. In the romance of Jane and Rochester, or
of Charlotte Brontë and George Gordon, Lord Byron, we are still in Angria,
“that burning clime where we have sojourned too long—its skies flame—the
glow of sunset is always upon it—.”
Wu t h er i ng H e igh t s
Wuthering Heights is as unique and idiosyncratic a narrative as Moby-Dick, and

like Melville’s masterwork breaks all the confines of genre. Its sources, like
the writings of the other Brontës, are in the fantasy literature of a very young
woman, in the poems that made up Emily Brontë’s Gondal saga or cycle.
Many of those poems, while deeply felt, simply string together Byronic com-
monplaces. A few of them are extraordinarily strong and match Wuthering
Heights in sublimity, as in the famous lyric dated January 2, 1846:
No coward soul is mine

No trembler in the world’s storm-troubled sphere
I see Heaven’s glories shine
And Faith shines equal arming me from Fear
O God within my breast

Almighty ever-present Deity
Life, that in me hast rest
As I Undying Life, have power in Thee
Vain are the thousand creeds

That move men’s hearts, unutterably vain,
Worthless as withered weeds
Or idlest froth amid the boundless main
Introduction
To waken doubt in one

Holding so fast by thy infinity
So surely anchored on
The steadfast rock of Immortality
With wide-embracing love

Thy spirit animates eternal years
Pervades and broods above,
Changes, sustains, dissolves, creates and rears
Though Earth and moon were gone

And suns and universes ceased to be
And thou wert left alone
Every Existence would exist in thee
There is not room for Death

Nor atom that his might could render void
Since thou art Being and Breath
And what thou art may never be destroyed.
We could hardly envision Catherine Earnshaw, let alone Heathcliff, chant-

ing these stanzas. The voice is that of Emily Jane Brontë addressing the God
within her own breast, a God who certainly has nothing in common with
the one worshipped by the Reverend Patrick Brontë. I do not hear in this
poem, despite all its Protestant resonances, any nuance of Byron’s inverted
Miltonisms. Wuthering Heights seems to me a triumphant revision of Byron’s
Manfred, with the revisionary swerve taking Emily Brontë into what I would
call an original gnosis, a kind of poetic faith, like Blake’s or Emerson’s, that
resembles some aspects (but not others) of ancient Gnosticism without in
any way actually deriving from Gnostic texts. “No coward soul is mine” also
emerges from an original gnosis, from the poet’s knowing that her pneuma
or breath-soul, as compared to her less ontological psyche, is no part of the
created world, since that world fell even as it was created. Indeed the cre-
ation, whether heights or valley, appears in Wuthering Heights as what the
ancient Gnostics called the kenoma, a cosmological emptiness into which we
have been thrown, a trope that Catherine Earnshaw originates for herself.
A more overt Victorian Gnostic, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, made the best (if
anti-feminist) observation on the setting of Wuthering Heights, a book whose
“power and sound style” he greatly admired:
It is a fiend of a book, an incredible monster, combining all the

stronger female tendencies from Mrs. Browning to Mrs. Brown-
Harold Bloom
rigg. The action is laid in Hell,—only it seems places and people

have English names there.
Mrs. Brownrigg was a notorious eighteenth-century sadistic and murderous

midwife, and Rossetti rather nastily imputed to Wuthering Heights a con-
siderable female sadism. The book’s violence is astonishing but appropriate,
and appealed darkly both to Rossetti and to his close friend, the even more
sadomasochistic Swinburne. Certainly the psychodynamics of the relation-
ship between Heathcliff and Catherine go well beyond the domain of the
pleasure principle. Gilbert and Gubar may stress too much that Heathcliff
is Catherine’s whip, the answer to her most profound fantasies, but the sug-
gestion was Emily Brontë’s before it became so fully developed by her best
feminist critics.
Walter Pater remarked that the precise use of the term romantic did not
apply to Sir Walter Scott, but rather:
Much later, in a Yorkshire village, the spirit of romanticism bore a

more really characteristic fruit in the work of a young girl, Emily
Brontë, the romance of Wuthering Heights; the figures of Hareton
Earnshaw, of Catherine Linton, and of Heathcliff—tearing open
Catherine’s grave, removing one side of her coffin, that he may
really lie beside her in death—figures so passionate, yet woven
on a background of delicately beautiful, moorland scenery, being
typical examples of that spirit.
I always have wondered why Pater found the Romantic spirit more in
Hareton and the younger Catherine than in Catherine Earnshaw, but I
think now that Pater’s implicit judgment was characteristically shrewd. The
elder Catherine is the problematical figure in the book; she alone belongs to
both orders of representation, that of social reality and that of otherness, of
the Romantic Sublime. After she and the Lintons, Edgar and Isabella, are
dead, then we are wholly in Heathcliff ’s world for the last half year of his
life, and it is in that world that Hareton and the younger Catherine are por-
trayed for us. They are—as Heathcliff obscurely senses—the true heirs to
whatever societally possible relationship Heathcliff and the first Catherine
could have had.
Emily Brontë died less than half a year after her thirtieth birthday,
having finished Wuthering Heights when she was twenty-eight. Even
Charlotte, the family survivor, died before she turned thirty-nine, and the
world of Wuthering Heights reflects the Brontë reality: the first Catherine dies
at eighteen, Hindley at twenty-seven, Heathcliff ’s son Linton at seventeen,
Isabella at thirty-one, Edgar at thirty-nine, and Heathcliff at thirty-seven or
Introduction
thirty-eight. It is a world where you marry early, because you will not live
long. Hindley is twenty when he marries Frances, while Catherine Earnshaw
is seventeen when she marries the twenty-one-year old Edgar Linton.
Heathcliff is nineteen when he makes his hellish marriage to poor Isabella,
who is eighteen at the time. The only happy lovers, Hareton and the second
Catherine, are twenty-four and eighteen, respectively, when they marry. Both
patterns—early marriage and early death— are thoroughly High Romantic,
and emerge from the legacy of Shelley, dead at twenty-nine, and of Byron,
martyred to the cause of Greek independence at thirty-six.
The passions of Gondal are scarcely moderated in Wuthering Heights,
nor could they be; Emily Brontë’s religion is essentially erotic, and her
vision of triumphant sexuality is so mingled with death that we can imagine
no consummation for the love of Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw
except death. I find it difficult therefore to accept Gilbert and Gubar’s
reading in which Wuthering Heights becomes a Romantic feminist critique
of Paradise Lost, akin to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Emily Brontë is no
more interested in refuting Milton than in sustaining him. What Gilbert
and Gubar uncover in Wuthering Heights that is antithetical to Paradise
Lost comes directly from Byron’s Manfred, which certainly is a Romantic
critique of Paradise Lost. Wuthering Heights is Manfred converted to prose
romance, and Heathcliff is more like Manfred, Lara, and Byron himself
than is Charlotte Brontë’s Rochester.
Byronic incest—the crime of Manfred and Astarte—is no crime for
Emily Brontë, since Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw are more truly
brother and sister than are Hindley and Catherine. Whatever inverted
morality—a curious blend of Catholicism and Calvinism—Byron enjoyed,
Emily Brontë herself repudiates, so that Wuthering Heights becomes
a critique of Manfred, though hardly from a conventional feminist
perspective. The furious energy that is loosed in Wuthering Heights is
precisely Gnostic; its aim is to get back to the original Abyss, before the
creation-fall. Like Blake, Emily Brontë identifies her imagination with
the Abyss, and her pneuma or breath-soul with the Alien God, who is
antithetical to the God of the creeds. The heroic rhetoric of Catherine
Earnshaw is beyond every ideology, every merely social formulation,
beyond even the dream of justice or of a better life, because it is beyond
this cosmos, “this shattered prison”:
“Oh, you see, Nelly! he would not relent a moment, to keep me

out of the grave! That is how I’m loved! Well, never mind! That is
not my Heathcliff. I shall love mine yet; and take him with me —
he’s in my soul. And,” added she, musingly, “the thing that irks
me most is this shattered prison, after all. I’m tired, tired of being
10 Harold Bloom
enclosed here. I’m wearying to escape into that glorious world, and
to be always there; not seeing it dimly through tears, and yearning
for it through the walls of an aching heart; but really with it, and
in it. Nelly, you think you are better and more fortunate than I; in
full health and strength. You are sorry for me—very soon that will
be altered. I shall be sorry for you. I shall be incomparably beyond
and above you all. I wonder he won’t be near me!” She went on to
herself. “I thought he wished it. Heathcliff, dear! you should not
be sullen now. Do come to me, Heathcliff.”
Whatever we are to call the mutual passion of Catherine and Heathcliff, it

has no societal aspect and neither seeks nor needs societal sanction. Romantic
love has no fiercer representation in all of literature. But “love” seems an
inadequate term for the connection between Catherine and Heathcliff.
There are no elements of transference in that relation, nor can we call the
attachment involved either narcissistic or anaclitic. If Freud is not appli-
cable, then neither is Plato. These extraordinary vitalists, Catherine and
Heathcliff, do not desire in one another that which each does not possess,
do not lean themselves against one another, and do not even find and thus
augment their own selves. They are one another, which is neither sane nor
possible, and which does not support any doctrine of liberation whatsoever.
Only that most extreme of visions, Gnosticism, could accommodate them,
for, like the Gnostic adepts, Catherine and Heathcliff can only enter the
pleroma or fullness together, as presumably they have done after Heathcliff
‘s self-induced death by starvation.
Blake may have promised us the Bible of Hell; Emily Brontë seems
to have disdained Heaven and Hell alike. Her finest poem (for which we
have no manuscript, but it is inconceivable that it could have been written
by Charlotte) rejects every feeling save her own inborn “first feelings”
and every world except a vision of earth consonant with those inaugural
emotions:
Often rebuked, yet always back returning

To those first feelings that were born with me,
And leaving busy chase of wealth and learning
For idle dreams of things which cannot be:
To-day, I will seek not the shadowy region;

Its unsustaining vastness waxes drear;
And visions rising, legion after legion,
Bring the unreal world too strangely near.
Introduction 11
I’ll walk, but not in old heroic traces,

And not in paths of high morality,
And not among the half-distinguished faces,
The clouded forms of long-past history.
I’ll walk where any own nature would be leading:

It vexes me to choose another guide:
Where the gray flocks in ferny glens are feeding;
Where the wild wind blows on the mountain side.
What have those lonely mountains worth revealing?

More glory and more grief than I can tell:
The earth that wakes one human heart to feeling
Can centre both the worlds of Heaven and Hell.
Whatever that centering is, it is purely individual, and as beyond gender as

it is beyond creed or “high morality.” It is the voice of Catherine Earnshaw,
celebrating her awakening from the dream of heaven:
“I was only going to say that heaven did not seem to be my home;
and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; and
the angels were so angry that they flung me out, into the middle
of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights; where I woke sob-
bing for joy.”
H umphrey G awthrop
Slavery: Idée Fixe of Emily and Charlotte Brontë
Slavery is a subject common to both Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre and
Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. Even where a direct West Indian or
African connection is absent, slavery-related themes such as brutality, exploi-
tation, and deprivation are present. This article considers the background to
the Brontë family’s knowledge of slavery, and how it manifests itself in their
work.
M ay Sinclair, in The Three Brontës, writes of Charlotte Brontë being

‘woken up’ by her reading of Wuthering Heights:
Charlotte, I think, said to herself, ‘That is what I ought to have

done. That is what I will do next time.’ And next time she did it . . .
if you must have an influence to account for Jane Eyre, there is no
need to go abroad to look for it . . . the strongest spirit, which was
Emily’s, prevailed . . . Charlotte’s genius must have quickened in
her when her nerves thrilled to the shock of Wuthering Heights.1
The two novels may be linked by a common but malevolent theme — Carribean
(Indian) slavery — with Emily the forerunner. Jane Eyre was begun in August
1846, a few months after Wuthering Heights was completed. Heathcliff ’s
Brontë Studies, Volume 28, Number 2 ( July 2001): pp. 113–121. © The Brontë Society
2001.
13
14 Humphrey Gawthrop
mother is referred to by Emily as an ‘Indian Queen’.2 Was this only in jest, or

is it a clue to ancestry? Rochester calls Bertha, his wife, his ‘Indian Messalina’.3
I suggest that the shared use of the word ‘Indian’ is no accident. The sisters
read their work aloud to each other. Both may be bent on creating story lines
with overtones of slavery in order to wash out and make clean the stained
handkerchief that was Brotosh colonial oppression. The drift underscoring
both novels may be the redemption of slaves and consequent comeuppance of
slave-masters. The conclusion to this study spotlights the target. Both novels
can lead us to believe that Emily and Charlotte were impeaching systems that
allowed, not only white domination of black, but, in a figurative, and lesser,
sense, male domination of female, and adult domination of child.
Rochester tells Jane Eyre that his father knew ‘Mr. Mason, a West
India planter and merchant . . . his possessions were real and vast.’ Bertha,
of Creole ancestry, is shipped to England to be locked in a third-storey
room at Thornfield. Her Creole mother would be somebody born West
Indian or Latin American, but of European, especially Spanish, descent.
Antoinetta, the mother, sounds Spanish, but could equally be English. The
whole background of Bertha Mason and Heathcliff, two violent, unbridled
characters, is highly suggestive of brutality born out of slavery, which was
the biggest issue of the time. In chapter 11 of Wuthering Heights Heathcliff
addresses Catherine with:
I seek no revenge on you . . . That’s not the plan. The tyrant grinds
down his slaves and they don’t turn against him: they crush those
beneath them.
Heathcliff crushed those beneath him. Slaves were mostly identified by

single names, and Heathcliff has one. We must look to the novels to see to
what extent Afro-Caribbean slavery may have gained a foothold in both,
and examine the sources of knowledge available to Emily and Charlotte, of
Africa (see Appendix A for sources that first aroused the imaginations of the
young Brontës) and, at this juncture, the Caribbean.
Midnight, 31 July 1838, is recorded as the time and date on which
full freedom came to slaves in the British colonies. A slave in the Jamaican
capital of Spanish Town recorded his thanks ‘to Almighty God and next
the English nation, whose laws have relieved us from the bondage in which
we have been held. God bless and grant long life to our Queen Victoria’.4
Black freedom at last, granted by the white hand of England, that had itself
been selling blacks into slavery for over two hundred years prior to their
final emancipation. The date would not have passed unnoticed in the Brontë
household. British history was heavily discoloured by Britain’s major role in
the slave trade up to 1838, but even after emancipation Britain was showing
signs of imperialism towards India. As Susan Meyer puts it:
Perhaps the eight years since emancipation provided enough his-

torical distance for Brontë (that is Charlotte) to make a serious
and public, though implicit, critique of British slavery and British
imperialism in the West Indies.5
Meyer’s article deals with Charlotte only, but this comment would seem to
apply to Emily, with liberty the breath of her nostrils, even more.
The Reverend Patrick Brontë had connections with the great abolitionist
William Wilberforce, ‘the African’s Friend’,6 having been sponsored by him
through St John’s College, Cambridge, and having sent his daughters to
the Clergy Daughters’ School at Cowan Bridge, of which Wilberforce was
a patron.7 Wilberforce visited Keighley and Theodore Dury in July 1827, as
Juliet Barker has recorded. She points out that it seems more than likely that
Patrick would have been invited to Keighley to meet Wilberforce.8 With
Wilberforce a Member of Parliament for a Yorkshire seat (Hull), and Patrick
having doubtless read A Letter on the Abolition of the Slave Trade addressed
to the Freeholders and other Inhabitants of Yorkshire (1807), and followed the
various reports of public meetings and subsequent petitions to Parliament
(312 from England and Wales, 187 from Scotland),9 the evidence points to
the Haworth parsonage fairly humming with passion and indignation at
the injustice of slavery. The nearby Ponden House library had copies of John
Tuffman’s Island of Antigua, Brief Account of (1787) and Daniel McKinnan’s
A Tour through British West Indies (1804), so Charlotte and Emily would have
had the opportunity to read these in addition to first-hand knowledge from
their father of the slave trade, and Wilberforce and his campaign to end it.
The general debate about black freedom would also reach the parsonage
through various papers and periodicals, and any article about Wilberforce
and his disciples would have been keenly mulled over. In 1838 the Quarterly
Review included a review of the Life of William Wilberforce. Branwell, too,
would bring his sisters information about Liverpool (the premier port in the
slave trade after Bristol, and where Heathcliff was found10) after his visits of
1839 and 1845.11 Branwell’s 1845 drawing of the boxers Bendigo and Caunt
shows them delineated as black silhouettes, though neither was, in fact,
black. That they are shown to be black and semi-naked, with the figure on
the left holding a chain, is highly suggestive of a slavery setting.12
There are other sources of Caribbean knowledge to be mentioned. In
1838 John Gibson Lockhart’s Life of Sir Walter Scott, Bart, his father-in-law,
first appeared. As F. B. Pinion has written,13 it can be assumed that Charlotte
and her sisters read Lockhart as soon as they could after its appearance.
Margaret Smith is of the same opinion.14 Lockhart records that in August

1825, John Wilson (of Blackwood’s Magazine), staged a regatta in honour of
Canning, attended by Scott, Wordsworth, Southey, and others, the venue
being John Bolton’s Storrs Hall on Lake Windermere:
A large company had been assembled there in honour of the min-

ister . . . It has not, I suppose, often happened to a plain English
merchant, wholly the architect of his own fortunes, to entertain at
one time a party embracing so many illustrious names . . . .15
G. Bernard Wood has written of historical notes in the vestibule of the

modern Storrs Hall, an hotel, which state that Bolton owned slaves. Slaves
carried to the West Indies might fetch as much as £44; the trade was not at
that time illegal.16
On the 15 June 1839, in a letter to Ellen Nussey, Charlotte wrote of
her stay at Swarcliffe Hall, near Harrogate, the summer residence of John
Greenwood, brother of Mrs John Benson Sidgwick, to whose children
Charlotte was presently governess. In their article on Jane Eyre and the
Greenwood family, Sarah Fermi and Robin Greenwood mention that
Frederick Greenwood would also have been present at this summer gathering
and that Frederick Greenwood’s wife was the daughter of Samuel Staniforth,
a Liverpool merchant who inherited a large fortune made in whaling and the
slave trade.17 Her brother, the Reverend Thomas Staniforth, the son and heir
of Samuel Staniforth, was afterwards to inherit Storrs Hall, the home of his
uncle John Bolton. The article poses the question — could Thomas have visited
his sister and her husband Frederick Greenwood while they were at Swarcliffe
Hall, so that conversation could have turned on the West Indies and Spanish
Town in Jamaica, to be overhead by Charlotte? She and Emily may have heard
the same name — John Bolton — mentioned by Branwell, who had been
resident in the Lakes as tutor to the Postlethwaite boys in 1840 and, no doubt,
spent free time in the local inns and picked up gossip. We know the cause of
Branwell’s dismissal as tutor — ‘visibly the worse for drink’.18
Another Caribbean fragment is mentioned in a letter Charlotte wrote
to Monsieur Heger on 24 October 1844: ‘I have just had bound all the books
you gave me when I was at Brussels. I take delight in contemplating them;
they make quite a little library. To begin with, there are the complete works
of Bernardin de St. Pierre — the Penses de Pascal . . .’. In St. Pierre’s romance
Paul et Virginie, published in 1787, the heroine perishes in a shipwreck on
her way back to Paul, a Creole from the Caribbean. Charlotte would read it
some time after 1843. She included ships with the names Paul et Virginie and
Antigua in Villette.19 Antigua may have come from Tuffman’s account of the
island of that name in the Ponden House library.
We should now consider how, and to what extent, Charlotte and Emily
used their gleanings from these sources (including those in Appendix A) in
Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. (Already in her first novel, The Professor,
Charlotte had made tentative slave allusions with her ‘parting her lips, as full
as those of a hot-blooded Maroon’ and ‘when she stole about me with the soft
step of a slave — I felt at once barbarous and sensual as a pasha’.20)
Emily, the stronger spirit, was the likely precursor in sowing the seed
of slavery and then by inference damning it. We shall consider her first. Her
crosscurrent of slavery seems even more deeply and deliberately submerged
than the other components, themes, and ideas found by the commentators
in Wuthering Heights: love and loss of love, morality, duplicity, revenge,
inheritance, education, nature and culture, and so on. Slavery may be there
too. It ties in with ideas of inheritance and revenge certainly, and does nothing
to disturb or displace the poetic, Gondal, origins of the characters depicted.
The immediate and most obvious clue to slavery as a theme which Emily first
gives us is Heathcliff’s single name. She does not mean to imply thereby that
Heathcliff is a slave, but that he may be descended from a slave. From chapter
4 of Wuthering Heights we gather that Mr Earnshaw christened Heathcliff
after a son that had died in childhood. Herbert Dingle has suggested he
was the elder Earnshaw’s illegitimate son. 21 The name Heathcliff attaches to
the boy as both Christian and surname. He is never Heathcliff Earnshaw.
By analogy, in the long history of the slave trade, the moment slaves were
landed from the slave ships they were given new names, to change identity,
to subjugate them even further and confirm the white power in whose vice-
like grip they were held. Simple Christian names recurred time and again.22
Books are full of instances from the lives of individual slaves, thus we can
point to Hamlet (slave), Jupiter (slave), Jamaica (slave), Fedon (slave leader),
Hannibal (slave), Moses (slave), Mingo (slave), Quamina (slave leader and
black deacon) — the list never ends.23 All the characters in Wuthering Heights
have first and second names or titles, except Heathcliff. (Ellen Dean calls
him ‘Mr Heathcliff’ when addressing him, but by that time he has returned
to the Heights after an absence of three years.) To the list of single names we
can add Joseph and Zilah who, as servants, were slaves in a sense.
Add to Heathcliff ’s single name his stated attributes, and the idea that
Emily is adding a slave component to her story takes a firmer hold. Edward
Chitham suggests that Emily had thought about the situation of ex-slaves and
half-castes.24 Page 1 of Wuthering Heights refers to Heathcliff ’s ‘black eyes,’
and chapter 4 to his black hair, his skin ‘as dark almost as if it came from the
devil’. In chapter 6 of the novel he is ‘a little Lascar, or an American Spanish
castaway.’ In chapter 7, Heathcliff says to Nelly ‘I wish I had light hair and a
fair skin.’ Nelly says to Heathcliff ‘A good heart will help you to a bonny face,
my lad, if you were a regular black.’ Again, ‘your mother an Indian Queen,’
and ‘. . . you were kidnapped by wicked sailors and brought to England’ (which
is a slave ship in reverse, in effect). In the same chapter 7, however, there is a
reference to Heathcliff ’s ‘elegant locks,’ hardly suggestive of pure negroid hair,
but Emily never implies that Heathcliff is totally black. In chapter 17, when
Heathcliff breaks into the Heights and fights with Hindley, Emily describes
his ‘sharp cannibal teeth.’ This strongly suggests that Africa is somehow buried
deep in Heathcliff ’s ancestry. If that is accepted, it follows that Emily may
also be hinting at inter-breeding in Heathcliff ’s relationships. Stevie Davies
considers Catherine’s ‘I am Heathcliff ’ to be one of the most unforgettable
gestures of bonding in literature.25 Is Emily implying by those three words
that Catherine and Heathcliff are not only a spiritual, but also a physical,
amalgam? She is even stronger on innuendo with the consummate marriage
of Heathcliff and Isabella Linton (which produces Linton Heathcliff ).
Violence is a strong ingredient in Wuthering Heights. All slave-masters
and their slaves knew that the relationship was forged by and secured in
violence. Whipping played a central role in maintaining slavery and defined
the relationship between white master and black slave.26 Thus Hindley treats
Heathcliff with violence: Heathcliff is ‘hardened . . . to ill-treatment: he would
stand Hindley’s blows without winking or shedding a tear.’ Hindley, in chapter
6, is now master of the Heights, denies Heathcliff education, makes him work
out of doors and says he must sleep with the servants. In chapter 7, Hindley’s
treatment of Heathcliff was ‘enough to make a fiend of a saint.’
Is the story of Heathcliff that of the risen slave? Heathcliff, descended
from slave stock, survives and returns to claim the Heights. Does he become,
in his turn, successor to Hindley in terms of cruelty? In chapter 14 Heathcliff,
having cruelly belittled Isabella his wife, and thrust her from the room, says
to Ellen Dean:
I have no pity! I have no pity! The more the worms writhe, the
more I yearn to crush out their entrails! It is a moral teething; and
I grind with greater energy, in proportion to the increase of pain’.
In chapter 21, Heathcliff says of Hareton:
‘I can sympathise with all his feelings, having felt them myself.
I know what he suffers now, for instance, exactly; it is merely a
beginning of what he shall suffer, though . . . I’ve got him faster
than his scoundrel of a father secured me, and lower . . .’
The cruelty builds in chapter 27: ‘. . . my father threatened me,’ gasped the boy
[Linton Heathcliff ] . . . ‘and I dread him — I dread him!’ This is the terror
of a victim, and the worse for being Heathcliff ’s own son. Linton ‘wakes and
shrieks in the night, by the hour . . .’ after Heathcliff has brutalized him (chap-
ter 29). Cathy is not spared either, being on the receiving end of ‘a shower of
terrific slaps on both sides of the head’ and Cathy shows Linton “her cheek
cut on the inside, against her teeth and her mouth filling with blood’ (chapter
28). She is threatened with having to marry Linton immediately, or remain a
prisoner at Wuthering Heights until her father is dead. Ellen is imprisoned at
the Heights five nights and four days. Finally, Heathcliff removes Cathy from
the grange by force and hurries her to the Heights — his prisoner — where
she is consigned to eat her meals in the kitchen with Joseph.
There are some of the worst scenes of violence in literature, reminiscent,
in a different context, of the worst excesses of slavery. Utter control was the
code, and if any sign of rebellion appeared, punitive violence erupted. Linton
and Cathy are constantly harried and punished for stepping out of line; a
slave’s deviation from the code would be met with even worse horrors such as
face-branding, mutilation, and amputation.27 (Rochester’s wealth, we should
note, was derived from slave labour, and Charlotte makes him suffer similar
slave punishments at the hands of Bertha — burning, blinding, and maiming.)
Heathcliff is pitiless in the pursuit of his goal — the accretion of property by
the use of power: this is no different from a ruthless slave-owner accruing
wealth on the backs of his slaves.
These three clues, Heathcliff ’s single name, his characteristic features,
and his violence, seem to point to a consistent theme of slavery in Wuthering
Heights. Heathcliff is bred out of slavery and, having usurped Hindley, is
himself tainted by his birthright to adopt Hindley’s own power-lust. He comes
to own Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange and the descendants of
both owning families are totally in his power. But suddenly, by making him see
Catherine’s ghost, Emily strips Heathcliff of his property and power, as if in
celebration of the final, and real, emancipation of slaves from 1838. The storm
of slavery that had been blowing over the West Indies for two hundred years
was now finally blown out. The heredity of slavery was over, order established
once more. Cathy and Hareton become children of freedom.
In the final chapter, Nelly muses:
‘But where did he come from, the little dark thing, harboured by a
good man to his bane?’ muttered superstition, as I dozed into uncon-
sciousness. And I began, half dreaming, to weary myself with imaging
some fit parentage for him . . . I tracked his existence over again, with
grim variations; at last, picturing his death and funeral: of which, all I
can remember is, being exceedingly vexed at having the task of dictat-
ing an inscription for his monument, and consulting the sexton about
it; and, as he had no surname, and we could not tell his age, we were
obliged to content ourselves with the single word, ‘Heathcliff.’28
We have reached the end, but are still, apparently, expected to be as uncom-
mitted as Emily was about Heathcliff ’s genesis. Ellen Dean has no idea
where he was born, or who were his parents.29 In spite of her guideposts,
Emily does not point us in a specific direction. But we may notice that all
the births, deaths, and marriages in the novel take place approximately within
the last fifty years of the slave trade, 1757 to 1803. While slaves had to wait
until 1838 for full freedom, the trade itself was outlawed in 1807, four years
after the marriage of Cathy and Hareton in 1803.
Charlotte (awakened by Wuthering Heights, according to May Sinclair)
may be following, in the creation of Bertha, the same evocative ancestral
trail taken by Emily with Heathcliff, yet far more explicitly. She too, gives
out only pointers at first: ‘I presently gathered that the new-comer was
called Mr. Mason . . . Presently the words Jamaica, Kingston, Spanish Town,
indicated the West Indies as his residence’.30 And then that low laugh from
a locked room. The tension builds with Rochester’s awareness of Mason’s
presence at Thornfield: ‘Mason! — the West Indies!’ and Charlotte makes
him repeat the words three times, growing ‘whiter than ashes’.31 We sense
a watershed approaching, and in chapter 26 we go over the edge. Charlotte
delivers a series of hammer blows to the reader’s senses, Bertha comes from
Creole stock, she rises up like a ‘clothed hyena on its hind feet’. The analogy
with one of the most savage animals on the plains of Africa is very vivid.
Bertha depicted as a hyena suggests her descent from the same continent.
The hyena’s laugh and Bertha’s laugh seem to match each other with a grisly
sameness. Both have a vicious bite. Bertha is mad, and her mother both a
madwoman and a drunkard. Charlotte could have made Rochester’s wife,
for whom various ‘Yorkshire attic’ models have been suggested, pure French —
say Adèle’s mother Celine Varens, at one time Rochester’s mistress. Charlotte
chose instead the Caribbean for her parentage, and the whole spectrum of
planters, slaves, and the Afro-Atlantic trade suddenly comes into view. It is a
brilliant stroke, this coup de foudre, with its implication not only of slavery, but
bigamy too. Whilst a Creole can be born free, that is free of African descent,
Charlotte conjures up the possibility that Bertha Mason’s ancestors might
have included slaves, with all that that implies: a voyage of months on a slave
ship, in conditions of the greatest adversity, storms at sea, in chains, prone to
the spread of disease (smallpox, dysentery), open to sexual harassment, and
finally the new name and the new pidgin language (creole).32 Wilberforce’s
colleague, Thomas Clarkson, on a fact-finding mission, saw in the windows
of a Liverpool shop leg-shackles, hand-cuffs, thumb-screws, and mouth-
openers for force-feeding used on board the slavers.33
These mixtures of pigmentation in the history of Charlotte’s Creole gave
the novel a very dramatic and topical background. Rochester’s marriage to a
woman with black antecedents bears some resemblance to the shock to earlier
readers and audiences of Othello’s alliance with Desdemona. Charlotte must

have intended this. The inference is strong that Charlotte and Emily must
have discussed the idea of miscegenation. As Wuthering Heights was being
shaped and written before Charlotte began writing Jane Eyre, it does seem
possible that Charlotte borrowed the idea of Bertha’s mixed ancestry from
Emily and Heathcliff.
Allegorically, both novels may be using a sub-text and condemning
other forms of slavery apart from black subjection to white, namely female
to male (governesses not least) and child to adult. In Chapter 27, when he is
telling Jane of his mistresses, Rochester says:
Hiring a mistress is the next worse thing to buying a slave: both

are often by nature, and always by position, inferior: and to live
familiarly with inferiors is degrading. I now hate the recollection
of the time I passed with Celine, Giacinta, and Clara.
Lowood School and, earlier, Mrs Reed, are examples of child slavery.
Rochester pays a heavy price for his symbolic domination of women as well
as his amassing of colonial wealth. Heathcliff pays the ultimate price for his
cruelty, and his acquisition of property does not help him in the long run
either. Emily and Charlotte stamp their libertarian authority on both novels
and strike a dual blow for freedom.
Before leaving the sisters it is perhaps worth noting one or two facts
about Jamaica that were in place before their birth. It was settled by the British
in 1665. By 1768 there were 17,000 whites to 167,000 slaves, and by 1809
the figures were 30,000 and 300,000 respectively. In the decade 1783–1793,
Liverpool ships made nearly nine hundred round trips and disposed of slaves
to a value of £15,186,850.34 By 1800 1.5 million Africans had been landed in
the British Islands. Between 1775 and 1824 half the region’s sugar came from
Jamaica. The single most important crop — the biggest volume of exports,
the most lucrative produce, and the crop which devoured the labours of ever-
increasing gangs of slaves — was sugar. By 1800 the British consumption of
sugar had increased 2500 per cent in 150 years, all this the work of slaves.35
No t e s
1. May Sinclair, The Three Brontës (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1914).
2. Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (The World’s Classics, Oxford University
Press, 1947), chapter 7.
3. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (The World’s Classics, Oxford University
Press, 1991), chapter 27.
4. W. L. Burn, Emancipation and Apprenticeship in the British West Indies (Lon-
don, 1937), p. 360.
5. Susan L. Meyer, Imperialism at Home: Race in Victorian Women’s Fiction

(Ithaca, NY, 1996), pp. 60–95.
6. Juliet Barker, The Brontës (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1994), p. 145.
7. Barker, p. 119.
8. Barker, p. 145.
9. Oliver Warner, William Wilberforce and his Times (London: B. T. Batsford
Ltd., 1962), pp. 64, 104.
10. Wuthering Heights, chapter 4.
11. Barker, pp. 313, 469–470.
12. Christine Alexander and Jane Sellars, The Art of the Brontës (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 348.
13. F. B. Pinion, Scott and Wuthering Heights, Brontë Society Transactions,
21.7 (1996), p. 313.
14. Margaret Smith, Letters of Charlotte Brontë, vol. 2 (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 2000), p. 432, n. 1.
15. J. G. Lockhart, Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Bart, abridged ver-
sion in one volume, p. 529.
16. G. Bernard Wood, A Negro Trail in the North of England (Country Life
Annual, 1967).
17. Sarah Fermi and Robin Greenwood, ‘Jane Eyre and the Greenwood Fam-
ily’, Brontë Society Transactions, 22 (1997), p. 47.
18. Barker, p. 333.
19. Charlotte Brontë, Villette (Oxford University Press, 1984), Notes, p. 536.
20. Both extracts are quoted in Robert B. Heilman, ‘Charlotte Brontë’s ‘New
Gothic’, in From Austen to Conrad, ed. by R. C. Rathburn and M. Steinmann (Min-
neapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 1958), pp. 118–132. A Maroon
was a black Jamaican runaway slave; they formed bands and threatened white
supremacy.
21. Herbert Dingle, ‘The Origin of Heathcliff ’, Brontë Society Transactions,
16.2 (1972), pp. 131–138.
22. James Walvin, Black Ivory, Slavery in the British Empire, 2nd edition (Black-
well, 2001), p. 56.
23. Walvin’s Index, and his numerous sources, contain these names. Quamina
appears on p. 237 of his text. This name may be compared with ‘Quashia Quamina’,
quoted, for example, in Winifred Gerin’s Branwell Brontë (Thomas Nelson & Sons
Ltd., 1961), Appendix A, p. 314: ‘. . . Branwell, as well as Charlotte and Emily, had
from childhood written and romanced about a black changeling child, “Quashia
Quamina” . . .’.
24. Edward Chitham, The Birth of Wuthering Heights (Macmillan, 1998),
p. 119.
25. Stevie Davies, Emily Brontë, Heretic (Women’s Press, 1994), p. 199.
26. Walvin, Black Ivory, p. 206.
27. Walvin, p. 212.
30. Jane Eyre, chapter 18.
31. Jane Eyre, chapter 19.
33. Oliver Warner, William Wilberforce and his Times, p. 48.
34. Warner, p. 19.

Appendix A
Mungo Park (1771–1806), African explorer, was known to, and is men-
tioned in, Lockhart’s Life of Scott (see note 15) at p. 109. Park wrote Travels
in the Interior of Africa (1799). The Catalogue of Books in the Library of
Keighley Mechanics Institute includes under ‘Geography, Voyages, Travels,
& c.’ Campbell’s ‘Parke’s (sic) travels in Africa,’ Lander’s ‘Records of
Captain Clapperton’s Last Expedition to Africa’ and 33 volumes of ‘Modern
Traveller’ of which Africa comprises volumes 20, 21, and 22. The West
Coast of Africa was re-created by Charlotte and Branwell as their imaginary
kingdom of Angria. Tom Winnifirth’s Biographical Note to his edition of
Branwell’s poems (New York University Press, 1983) explains that Mungo
Park’s explorations and articles in Blackwood’s Magazine gave them back-
ground information on Africa. The modern Ashanti, in Ghana, is recalled
by Rebecca Fraser’s reference to 1834 seeing the expansion of Glass Town
with the foundation of Angria, ‘given to Zamorna in recognition of his
labours in the Ashantee wars’; see p. 88 of her Charlotte Brontë.
Appendix B
There is an interesting factual footnote to record concerning Emily, who may
have based her pseudonym Ellis (Bell) on George Ellis (1753–1815), whom
she found in Lockhart’s Life of Scott. Ellis was born in the West Indies. Ellis’s
father, also George, had been a planter on Jamaica (obviously using slave
labour), and his maternal grandfather, Samuel Long, member of the Council
of Jamaica, was the father of Edward Long, a Jamaican writer and planter,
who employed some 300 slaves at Lucky Valley plantation in Clarendon,
Jamaica. Edward Long was the author of a History of Jamaica in 1774, as
Walvin records (p. 124). Lockhart is silent on the slavery connections of the
Ellis and Long families. Nevertheless, Emily may have assumed they existed,
and we should not forget Charlotte’s comment that ‘Liberty was the breath of
Emily’s nostrils; without it she perished.’ To this extent Heathcliff ’s struggle
may represent, as part of the story, Emily’s tribute to the final victory of lib-
erty over bondage which was marked by the year 1838.
Appendix C
Dominica, birthplace of Jean Rhys, author of the Brontë-related novel, Wide
Sargasso Sea, was granted to Britain by the Peace of Paris. Her mother was
a Creole. The novel fills in the missing story in Jane Eyre. Rochester, on
honeymoon in the Caribbean, receives a letter from Daniel Cosway. ‘You
have been shamefully deceived by the Mason family. They tell you perhaps
that your wife’s name is Cosway, the English gentleman Mr. Mason being
her stepfather only, but they don’t tell you what sort of people were these
Cosways. Wicked and detestable slave-owners since generations — yes
everybody hate them in Jamaica. Wickedness is not the worst. There is mad-
ness in that family . . . I am your wife’s brother by another lady, half-way
house as we say. Her father and mine was a shameless man and of all his
illegitimates I am the most unfortunate and poverty stricken . . . ask that
devil of a man Richard Mason three questions and make him answer you. Is
your wife’s mother shut away, a raging lunatic and worse besides? Was your
wife’s brother an idiot from birth, though God mercifully take him early on?
Is your wife herself going the same way as her mother and all knowing it?
(Wide Sargasso Sea (London: Deutsch, 1996: later editions)).
A le x andra L each
“Escaping the body’s gaol”:

The Poetry of Anne Bronte
“She thought not of the grave, for that is but the

body’s gaol, but of all that is beyond it.”
Ellen Nussey (Gaskell 297)
A well-known and still ubiquitous twentieth-century reference source

dismisses Anne Bronte as “the youngest and least gifted of the celebrated
Bronte sisters,” and “writer of a few negligible poems” (de Ford 73). Often
side-stepped by critics and underrated by Charlotte Bronte herself, Anne
Bronte’s work sheds light on the intriguing Bronte family, but more impor-
tantly it reveals the inner thoughts of an early Victorian woman struggling
to find an authentic voice. I believe that Bronte’s poems chart her progress
from derivative copyist at the side of Emily Bronte, her sister and early liter-
ary twin, through an increasing self-awareness arising from her experiences
as a governess, to a fully-realized expression of her mature views and beliefs.
Anne Bronte uses images of confinement and loneliness and metaphors of
prisons and tombs throughout this journey. Instead of outgrowing this con-
ventional Romantic vocabulary that has been bequeathed and taught her,
she learns to reuse it as a language that describes her own understanding of
life’s boundaries.
Victorian Newsletter, Volume 101 (22 March 2002): pp. 27–31. © 2002 Ward Hellstrom
Publishing.
25
26 Alexandra Leach
Anne Bronte does not fit the mold created by Charlotte, Emily, and
Branwell Bronte and their later mythmakers. As a poet she works much more
in the tradition of earlier hymn writers and poets such as Cowper and Moore,
and is much closer to Wordsworth, among Romantic writers, than the Byron
and Shelley favored by her siblings. Anne Bronte’s poetry emphasizes the
faculty of reason, specifically reason aided by conscience. Emotions are not
inconsequential in her work, but they hold a subservient position to the
discipline of the intellect. Her most mature works lead her to positions that at
first may be seen as conventional or overly pious. In fact Anne Bronte’s views
on a generous and forgiving deity and on universal salvation are not common,
but represent a philosophy reached on her own through both logical analysis
and much soul-searching.
Bronte’s preferred methodology is a self-reflexive examination of her
own personal experiences. Apart from the Gondal poems, which are based
on the imaginary land and characters of Gondal that she invented and shared
with Emily, all of Bronte’s poetry arises from personal experience. She tries to
make sense of her life by subjecting these experiences to intellectual scrutiny
and challenge by other views. She does not shy away from examining difficult
issues; and Anne Bronte’s life experiences were difficult. Apart from the
relatively stable years between her two older sisters’ deaths when she was five
until she went away to school at age fifteen, she was either away from home and
homesick, or back in her father’s parsonage becoming increasingly alienated
from other family members. Still she worked successfully as a governess for
five years, published two novels, two poems in magazines, and a joint volume of
poetry with Charlotte and Emily, all before her death at age twenty-nine. She
was sent to school at all only because Emily was unable to adjust to life away
from Haworth and could not finish out her term; Charlotte, who taught at the
school, barely mentions her youngest sister in her abundant correspondence
from this period. When Charlotte and Emily traveled to Brussels to prepare
themselves to open a girls’ school, Anne Bronte was not invited to go. The
major joys of her life were the yearly visits to the sea at Scarborough while
she was employed by the Robinson family. After her resignation, probably as
a result of Branwell’s indiscretions with Mrs. Robinson, those trips came to an
end. It is not believed that she was ever offered an opportunity to marry.
Many of Bronte’s poems use words that express confinement: cages,
tombs, prisons, dungeons, chains. This device is not unexpected since the
poetry and novels by women of this era are permeated by what Sandra
Gilbert and Susan Gubar have called an “oppressive imagery of confinement
that reveals that the female artist feels trapped and sickened by suffocating
alternatives, and by the culture that created them” (64). What is strikingly
unique is that Anne Bronte finds alternative meanings for metaphors that
typically express disappointment, bereavement, loneliness, and homesickness.
Her early poems become scaffolds for the later poems, with the topography
of the early years showing little resemblance to that of the final ones.1 An
examination of the early Gondal poems, the middle poems written mainly
while she was a governess, and the late poems written back home in the
Haworth parsonage demonstrates this progression.
Most of the Gondal poems were written between 1836 and 1840, in
Haworth. Ada Harrison and Derek Stanford have called these the “imaginary”
poems because they are by a woman who has not yet been bruised by hard
experience (172). They are also the imaginary poems because they are infected
by Emily’s “torrid” Byronic heroes (Harrison and Stanford 175). It is especially
illuminating to think of them, however, as the inauthentic poems since they
are so heavily influenced by Emily. But even in these imitative, fledgling
poems, Bronte asserts her own views of life that do not share Emily’s themes
of revenge, rebellion, and scorn.
In “A Voice from the Dungeon,” the prisoner, Marina Sabia, speaks in
a resigned voice:
I’m buried now; I’ve done with life;

I’ve done with hate, revenge and strife;
I’ve done with joy, and hope and love
And all the bustling world above.
Long have I dwelt forgotten here

In pining woe and dull despair;
This place of solitude and gloom
Must be my dungeon and my tomb. (3: 1–9)
The dungeon and the tomb are virtually the same since to be imprisoned
and forgotten is a living death. Near the poem’s end, Marina Sabia utters
“one long piercing shriek,” which rouses her from her one consoling dream
of child and lover:
I looked around in wild despair,

I called them, but they were not there;
The father and the child are gone,
And I must live and die alone. (3: 51–54)
After this melodramatic episode the poem returns to its resigned misery.
“A Voice from the Dungeon” is a highly derivative poem and has even been
mistaken for Emily’s work (Bronte 167). Bronte’s heroines are not usually
given to making piercing shrieks, but the joy that the dreaming Marina Sabia
feels in being reunited with her darling child is purely Anne Bronte. Neither
28 Alexandra Leach
Charlotte nor Emily seems particularly interested in children and neither

expresses the yearning for a child that their sister voices.
“The Captive’s Dream” is similar to “A Voice from the Dungeon” in that
an imprisoned woman, Alexandrina Zenobia, who lies wasting in a dungeon,
dreams of her lover. The Byronic influence is clear in his description: “his
hollow wandering eyes,” “his marble brow.” And as Alexandrina Zenobia tries
to reach him:
I struggled wildly but it was in vain,

I could not rise from my dark dungeon floor,
And the dear name I vainly strove to speak,
Died in a voiceless whisper on my tongue, . . . . 2 (4: 18–21)
Bronte transfers the emphasis from Alexandrina’ s suffering to her concern

for the man who “bleeds and breaks” for her. She could stoically bear her
imprisonment if only it did not bring suffering upon her beloved. Bronte’s
personality emerges in these lines, in her disquiet over another’s grief, even
when she speaks in the voices of stock characters and locates them in the
Gothic settings of earlier Romantic poetry. 3
Both of these poems were written before Anne Bronte assumed her first
position as governess in April 1840. Then the imaginary world of Gondal
became largely silent and Bronte’s experiences as a paid employee in a busy
household began to supply the material for her verses. It was also at this time
that an attentive man, her father’s curate, William Weightman, entered her
life. His death, at the age of twenty-eight, in 1842 almost certainly inspired
Anne’s lines on a dead lover. Her work as a governess ended in 1845 and her
brief career as a published writer began.
The poem, “The Captive Dove,” clearly represents a woman yearning
for freedom. A bird in a cage is a common image of a trapped individual,
a yearning soul, or a woman with limited opportunities. The caged bird is
also a particularly appropriate metaphor for the Victorian governess, since
a governess is an educated lady who is required to work, trapped essentially,
within the homes of other people. The employment of a governess acts as
a testimony to the economic power of the Victorian middle-class father
and an indication of his wife’s leisure and ornamental status (Peterson 5);
it is also living proof that the woman’s own family and home have failed
her. A governess lives in exile from her own family, yet resides outside
the circle of her employer’s family and apart from the lower world of the
household servants.
In “The Captive Dove” Anne Bronte evokes the image of the gentle
bird with its haunting call. The scene is so heartbreaking that it has the
power to turn the speaker from her own loneliness:
Poor restless Dove, I pity thee,

And when I hear thy plaintive moan
I’ll mourn for thy captivity
And in thy woes forget mine own. (24: 1–4)
In vain! In vain! Thou canst not rise—

Thy prison roof confines thee there;
Its slender wires delude thine eyes,
And quench thy longing with despair. (24: 9–12)
A prison no longer has to have heavy stone walls or to be a cold, damp dun-
geon since invisible wires serve to confine the prisoner. Although the image
is more subtle, the airy cage still represents incarceration. But Bronte does
not have escape in mind:
Yet hadst thou one gentle mate

Thy little drooping heart to cheer
And share with thee thy captive state,
Thou couldst be happy even there. (24: 17–20)
It is not the captivity that is so hard to bear; it is the loneliness and neglect.
Bronte recognizes that relationship is crucial to her emotional health; to be
condemned to live without a soul mate is almost unbearable (Gilligan 8).
William Weightman’s early death prevents him from ever rescuing her from
her captive state, but his very real spiritual presence in her mind inspires new
metaphors of separation and loneliness.
In the first two stanzas of “Yes Thou Art Gone,” Anne Bronte describes
the physicality of her lover’s tomb:
Yes, thou art gone and never more

Thy sunny smile shall gladden me;
But I may pass the old church door
And pace the floor that covers thee;
May stand upon the cold damp stone

And think that frozen lies below
The lightest heart that I have known,
The kindest I shall ever know. (31: 1–8)
Placing the burial under the church floor strongly identifies with Weightman’s
tomb in Haworth’s village church. He is doubly entombed: frozen below the
floor and shut up within the building itself, and he is doubly dead: lifeless
30 Alexandra Leach
as well as frozen. The speaker’s pacing movements further emphasize the

narrow, captive space. The poem’s mood however is not bleak; it concludes
by reflecting on the sweetness of the lover’s transient existence and its lasting
impression upon the poet.
“Mirth and Mourning,” and its companion poem, originally published
as “Weep Not Too Much, My Darling,” are some of the last of the Gondal
poetry. Written a year after Bronte’s return to Haworth, and at a time that it
appears Emily had stopped writing poetry, this pair of verses demonstrates that
the themes of Gondal are merging with the themes of Bronte’s experiential
verses, and that Gondal’s dungeons no longer serve to contain her thoughts.
In the first poem Zerona argues with another speaker who implores her to
cast away her sorrow. But Zerona cannot be joyful when her lover is still
imprisoned:
For, in the brightest noontide glow,

The dungeon’s light is dim;
Though freshest winds around us blow,
No breath can visit him. (50: 17–20)
This poem may be an internal dialogue that takes place in the mind of
Zerona. A mental duel such as this is consistent with Bronte’s increasing use
of dialogue and rational argument as a way to refine ideas and present satis-
factory conclusions. The technique reaches its maturity in her last poems.
Striking similarities exist in the description of Zerona’ s prisoner-lover
to the dead lover of Bronte’s bereavement poems. The lines, “What waste of
youth, what hopes destroyed,” and “If he must sit in twilight gloom” could
easily refer to Weightman. In the answering poem, the imprisoned lover
responds, begging Zerona to enjoy nature for his sake:
When through the prison grating

The holy moonbeams shine,
And I am wildly longing
To see the orb divine
Not crossed, deformed, and sullied
By those relentless bars
That will not show the crescent moon,
And scarce the twinkling stars.
It is my only comfort
To think, that unto thee
The sight is not forbidden—
The face of heaven is free. . . . (51: 17–28)
The anguished lament raised by the first poem is not left unchallenged.
Bronte does not realize her purpose until she provides a convincing counter-
argument that offers comfort in a seemingly hopeless situation.
In “Severed and Gone,” Bronte is still reconciling herself to a lost love.
Again, she unflinchingly surveys death’s abode:
I know that in the narrow tomb

The form I loved was buried deep,
And left, in silence and in gloom,
To slumber out its dreamless sleep.
I know the corner, where it lies,

Is but a dreary place of rest:
The charnel moisture never dries
From the dark flagstones o’er its breast. (55: 5–12)
Bronte does not dwell upon the corrupting body. Instead, within her silent
bedchamber she prays that Heaven will grant her a vision of her loved one,
glorious in the afterlife. Bronte craves a visit from such a spiritual visitor,
for as long as she can remember him she can keep his memory fresh. She
firmly believes the earthly tomb can be transcended and replaced by “the
more distant residence of the spirit” (Harrison and Stanford 186). Bronte is
increasingly understanding herself to be the one in exile, far from her eternal
home of Heaven.
Four poems survive from the late summer of 1847 until shortly before
Bronte’s death in May 1849. These are her most authentic poems and although
though they contain some conventional didactic elements, to dismiss them as
such is to miss their individuality; for Anne Bronte’s s didacticism is not
commonplace, but is “of a passionate kind” (Ewbank 52), and the pupil she is
most concerned with examining is herself. She is rarely adamant; her religion
is “a quest, a patient sifting and internal discussion” (Chitham, “Religion”
133). An examination of the extensive revisions and word listings on Bronte’s
manuscripts reveals that she sifts not only religious ideas but words in her
efforts to achieve a clearer and simpler vocabulary. Her choice of hymn and
ballad forms also allows the most musical of the Bronte clan comfortable
boundaries within which to create. These are contours that many writers
before her have used, providing comfortable familiarity in their economical
rhymes and traditional rhythms (Scott 61).
“Self-Communion” is her longest poem—a dialogue between the
poet and an immortal speaker, perhaps Wisdom or Reason. It is a poem
so autobiographical in nature that Edward Chitham has placed it among
primary sources for understanding Anne Bronte’s personality (Bronte 3). The
32 Alexandra Leach
questioner asks the poet to look back on her life and search her memory, a
step that will provide her with the guidance she seeks. Bronte insists that
even as a child she strove “to find the narrow way” but her childish prayers
and artless cries were scorned by those around her. In time, the child (it) grew
wiser than her teachers in seeking the path to Heaven:
It asked for light, and it is heard;

God grants that struggling soul repose;
And, guided by his holy word,
It wiser than its teachers grows.
It gains the upward path at length,
And passes on from strength to strength. . . . (57: 115–120)
One of Bronte’s chief fears is that her experiences and reflections are chill-
ing and hardening her heart. She laments the loss of an early friendship,
someone who was her “sun by day and moon by night.” Critics widely
believe that Bronte is referring to an increasing estrangement from Emily,
whose early literary partnership had brought her so much delight.4 Emily’s
scorn of her sister’s crystallizing religious faith becomes a source of deep
anguish for Anne Bronte: the poet chooses to hide her concerns and dis-
coveries from those closest to her, further constricting the shell of silence
that she inhabits. In “Self-Communion,” the first speaker (echoing Bronte’s
own conscience) assures her:
Could I but hear my Saviour say,—

“I know thy patience and thy love;
How thou has held the narrow way,
For my sake laboured night and day,
And watched, and striven with them that strove;
And still hast borne, and didst not faint,”—
Oh, this would be reward indeed! (57: 326–332)
The second of the two poems that Bronte saw published during her
lifetime is entitled, significantly, “The Narrow Way.”5 Using archetypal
images of the Christian pilgrim (Duthie 85), it is a rousing foursquare
evangelical hymn filled with admonishments, encouragement, and assur-
ances of God’s rewards:
Believe not those who say

The upward path is smooth,
Lest thou shouldst stumble in the way
And faint before the truth.
It is the only road

Unto the realms of joy;
But he who seeks that blest abode
Must all his powers employ. (58: 1–8)
The “narrow way” has now evolved into a major theme in Anne Bronte’s last
poems, and she is no longer interested in exhuming its Romantic ancestors,
damp dungeons or silent tombs, to express it. These metaphors have merged
with a well-known phrase in Christian theology, the “straight and narrow”
path.6 Anne Bronte’s belief in the end is that life indeed is filled with sorrow
and loneliness. And when even her dearly loved home is no longer a place of
refuge, with Emily alienated, Charlotte pursuing her own ambitious goals,
and Branwell wallowing in self-abuse and defeat, she can still envision a path
that will lead her to her final destination of Heavenly reward and reunion
with loved ones. She affirms a constricted life of disappointments and absent
opportunities by transforming it into a pathway that if followed carefully
and faithfully will lead to a reconciling God. That which was a language of
failed expectations and estrangement now expresses a firm conviction that a
life lived within narrow borders can ultimately lead Home.
No t e s
1. Teddi Lynn Chicester draws the opposite conclusion for Emily Bronte’s
poems.
2. Both Elizabeth Hollis Berry and Maria Frawley provide in-depth discus-
sions of silence and voicelessness in Bronte’s poems and novels.
3. The name Alexandrina Zenobia is notable. Emily has nothing to say about
this Gondal character in her poems, although Charlotte includes a Zenobia in her
juvenile writings. The historical Zenobia was the third century C.E. Queen of Pal-
myra who was captured and paraded through Rome in golden chains. It would have
been typical of Bronte to derive her character from a real person rather than create
her entirely as a fiction.
4. See Mary Summer’s article for an exploration of this issue.
5. Desmond Pacey reported in the Times Literary Supplement his discovery
that this poem had appeared in the December 1848 issue of Fraser’s Magazine; many
works on Anne Bronte do not include this information.
6. “Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life,
and few there be that find it” (Matt. 7: 13–14).
Wor k s Ci t e d
Berry, Elizabeth Hollis. Anne Bronte’s Radical Vision: Structures of Consciousness. Victoria, BC:
University of Victoria, 1994.
Bronte, Anne. The Poems of Anne Bronte: A New Text and Commentary. Edited by Edward
Chitham. London: Macmillan, 1979.
34 Alexandra Leach
Chichester, Teddi Lynn. “Evading ‘Earth’s Dungeon’s Tomb’: Emily Bronte A.G.A., and the
Fatally Feminine.” Victorian Poetry, 29 (1991): pp. 1–15.
Chitham, Edward. A Life of Anne Bronte. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991.
———. “Religion, Nature and Art in the Work of Anne Bronte,” Bronte Society Transactions,
24 (1999): pp. 129–145.
de Ford, Miriam A. “Bronte, Anne.” British Authors of the Nineteenth Century. Edited by
Stanley J. Kunitz. New York: Wilson, 1936: pp. 73–74.
Duthie, Enid L. The Bronte’s and Nature. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986.
Ewbank, Inga-Stina. Their Proper Sphere: A Study of the Bronte Sisters as Early-Victorian Female
Novelists. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966.
Fawley, Maria H. Anne Bronte. New York: Twayne, 1996.
Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the
Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979.
Gaskell, Elizabeth. The Life of Charlotte Bronte. London: Smith, Elder, 1900.
Gilligan, Carol. In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1982.
Harrison, Ada, and Derek Stanford. Anne Bronte: Her Life and Work. London: Methuen,
1959.
Pacey, Desmond. “‘The Narrow Way.’” Times Literary Supplement, 18 Aug 1966, p. 743.
Peterson, M. J. “The Victorian Governess: Status Incongruence in Family and Society.” Suffer
and Be Still: Women in the Victorian Age. Edited by Martha Vicinus. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1973: pp. 3–19.
Scott, P. J. M. Anne Bronte: A New Critical Assessment. London: Vision, 1983.
Summer, Mary. “Anne Bronte’s Religion: First Signs of Breakdown in Relations with Emily.”
Bronte Society Transactions, 25 (2000): pp. 18–30.
E ssaka J oshua
“Almost my hope of heaven”: Idolatry and Messianic

Symbolism in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre
“My Master,” he says, “has forewarned me. Daily he announces

more distinctly,—‘Surely I come quickly;’ and hourly I more eagerly
respond,—‘Amen; even so come, Lord Jesus!’”1
T he ending of Jane Eyre, with its mysterious citation of the book of

Revelation and anticipation of the martyr’s death of St. John Rivers, has long
struck critics as problematic. Marianne Thormählen, for instance, suggests
that the shift from “the happy domesticity of the Rochesters to the dying
missionary has puzzled readers for generations.”2 Attempts at understanding
this shift have centered on the enigmatic characterization and purpose of St.
John Rivers.3 Thormählen, who writes the most sustained account of the
problem, argues that Jane Eyre “seems to transmit a profoundly contradic-
tory picture” of St. John Rivers.4 Thormählen holds that St. John acts in an
inconsistent manner: he saves Jane from certain death after she has crossed
the moor in her escape from Edward Rochester, yet he is also her oppressor
in attempting, forcefully, to persuade her to submit to a loveless marriage and
a possible early death as a Christian missionary in India. Judith Williams
likewise points out the inconsistency, suggesting that St. John cannot be
seen as truly charitable, even though he is an exponent of “evangelical char-
ity,” as Jane describes him.5 The significance, for Williams, lies in St. John’s
demise. St. John anticipates his sainthood, rather than achieves it. His lack
Philological Quarterly, Volume 81, Number 1 (Winter 2002): pp. 81–107.
35
36 Essaka Joshua
of love, then, may play a part in his possible shortfall.6 On the other hand,
Pollard and Gordon suggest more simply that there is no difficulty, as St.
John’s virtuous withdrawal from worldly pleasures is part of his saintly jour-
ney.7 The central theological question concerning his character seems to be:
Is St. John without fault and therefore entitled to sainthood?
Thormählen resolves the problem of St. John’s charitable yet destructive
nature by proposing that he has different attitudes to strangers and loved ones.
He is charitable to the former but less indulgent to those who have come
into his fold. Thormählen is, nevertheless, of the opinion that, as St. John
is devoid of sympathy for his fellow creatures and takes pride in advocating
reason above passion, he is at fault. The Christian religion highlights the
importance of love, but St. John denies this. Moreover, Thormählen suggests,
St. John is guilty of the sin of spiritual pride. As this would effectively debar
St. John from sainthood, Thormählen considers a range of solutions aimed
at understanding his character. Following Jerome Beaty, Thormählen states
that Jane and Edward have acted correctly in having sought and received
Divine guidance.8 Their union is, therefore, validated by God and is as close to
perfection as any earthly relationship can be: “The interrelationship of human
and Divine love is a central factor in the Brontë fiction as a whole and never
more so than in Jane Eyre.”9 The novel, then presents a difficulty, Thormählen
says: “if love is the answer, what about St. John?”10 Thormählen’s argument up
to this point has been that “love for God and Jesus is lacking in his [St. John’s]
religion as Jane conceives it at Morton, to say nothing of love for mankind.”11
Thormählen thus is forced to focus on the question of whether anything has
changed in St. John’s character by the time he reaches the end of his life, and
she acknowledges that the novel does not ascribe a change in character to St.
John in order to make him worthy of sainthood. She, therefore, argues for a
reconsideration of St. John’s character at the end of the novel on the basis of
the words of his closing letter (quoted in part above): St. John’s
plea expresses an eager yearning for Christ as well as that unques-

tioning acquiescence in God’s will which is the peculiar charac-
teristic of saved souls. The Christian it seems, has finally got the
better of the man; he is ambiguous still, but his old relentlessness,
the “fever in his vitals” (III. iv. 361), is gone. Like Rochester,
so different from him in so many ways, he has submitted to the
Divine order, and now he is preparing to meet his true love, Jesus
Christ. . . . The ending of Jane Eyre is not a closure so much as a
balancing of the book, which leaves the reader to contemplate two
very dissimilar patterns of human endeavour under the Heaven to
which both assign ultimate power. It does not seem necessary to
prefer one to the other or to pronounce a verdict on either.12
“Almost my hope of heaven”: Idolatry and Messianic Symbolism 37
Thormählen’s solution is to keep separate the religious paths taken by

Edward (and Jane) on the one hand and St. John on the other, arguing that
Brontë does not choose between them. There is, in my estimation, however,
enough evidence in the novel to suggest that Brontë does make a choice, and
that the final sentence of the novel encapsulates its fundamental theme.
The central religious theme of the novel is the renouncing of idolatry,
for which St. John acts as a symbol. St. John is problematic, however, because
a secondary theme of the novel is that rejecting idolatry does not require
a rejection of human relationships. Indeed, part of the point seems to be
that renouncing idolatry is necessary for good human relationships. Brontë
approves Jane’s “pattern of human endeavour,” not St. John’s. In this article I
shall try to demonstrate that the ending, far from creating problems for our
understanding of the novel, is in fact part of a sustained account of the role
of Jesus, the Christian Messiah, in human relationships, and that if read in
the way that I shall suggest, Jane Eyre is, despite some of the ways in which
it has been presented in the critical literature, a deeply religious novel, and
indeed a novel with an orthodox and unexceptionable Christian message.
The novel’s idolaters make false gods of other characters; they do this by
treating these other characters as if they had Messianic status, or could
somehow supplant the Christian Messiah. Much of the evidence for this
resides in the Biblical references in the novel, upon which there has, as yet,
been little sustained comment. If we look closely at the implicit and explicit
Biblical references, it is striking how many of these references overtly or
covertly ascribe Messianic status to the various characters in the novel. The
novel frequently does this by applying specific Christological verses. This
association between Messianic symbolism and fictional characters is wholly
eschewed at the end of the novel, to be replaced by an unequivocal focus on
Christ. I shall argue that one of the novel’s purposes—or at least one of the
narrator’s purposes—is to show that human relationships are successful only
if the partners in the relationship avoid the dangers of idolizing each other.
Salvation, as it were, comes not from human relationships and the human
beloved, but from Christ, the heavenly beloved. While it is not my main
purpose to give an account of the enigmatic role of St. John Rivers in the
novel, I shall try to show too that my reading of the religious aspects of Jane
Eyre can provide a solution to the cryptic conclusion of the novel, which is,
of course, a quotation from a Messianic text.
I shall begin by examining the various Biblical and theological references
in the novel, largely in the order in which they appear, highlighting the
development of these allusions. I shall not look at all such references, but
focus on those that have specific Messianic context, or at least that relate to
the general theme of idolatry—the worship of the creature. At the same time,
I shall show how the narrative includes contrary images and cautions the
38 Essaka Joshua
reader that these Messianic identifications and pretensions are disordered.

Almost all of the passages where characters in the novel are associated
with Messianic imagery and texts are negative in their general message
and effect. Characters assume the aspect of false Messiahs: their actions are
consequently dysfunctional, and the effects of these actions disruptive. But
this is not so in every case, and I shall consider the exceptions secondly.
On the basis of this examination, I shall try to come to some preliminary
conclusions about the Christian message found in the novel, a message
which is explicitly found in contemporary religious literature that, variously,
either was or may well have been known to Charlotte Brontë. I shall finally
relate my conclusion to the novel’s problematic ending, associated with St.
John Rivers.
2
Jane Eyre displays a clear progression in the ascription of Messianic status.
To begin with the protagonists: Edward Rochester implicitly thinks of Jane
Eyre as his Messiah from an early stage in their encounter; Jane takes rather
longer to think of Edward in this way. A hint of what is to appear later in
full-blown form is seen during the second meeting of Jane and Edward—the
first meeting when each is aware of the other’s identity. Edward commands
Jane to “Go into the library,” but immediately excuses his peremptory man-
ner: “— I mean, if you please. — (Excuse my tone of command; I am used to
say ‘Do this,’ and it is done: I cannot alter my customary habits for one new
inmate).”13 In at least two respects, this passage represents Edward placing
himself in a weak position relative to Jane. Obviously, despite his command-
ing manner, he is immediately forced to apologize and excuse himself. But
the words of his excuse are taken from an episode that occurs in the Gospels
of Matthew and Luke: the healing of the centurion’s servant. The centurion
asks for Jesus’ help in a way that explicitly links the centurion’s authority
with his unworthiness:
The centurion answered and said, Lord, I am not worthy that thou
shouldest come under my roof: but speak the word only, and my
servant shall be healed. For I am a man under authority, having
soldiers under me: and I say to this man, Go, and he goeth; and to
another, Come, and he cometh; and to my servant, Do this, and
he doeth it.14
The episode holds the centurion as an example of a gentile who is more

deserving of Jesus’ help because it is more difficult for him to have faith.
Edward’s description to Jane of his own authority is, then, suffused with
ambiguity and qualification. But addressing Jane in the terms used by the
centurion to address Jesus anticipates Edward’s later attitude: Jane is indeed,

as he sees it, his Messiah.
The next time Edward makes Messianic allusions is again in relation
to his own actions and status. He attempts to justify his proposed bigamy by
arguing that his love for Jane is sufficient to atone for the wrongdoing, in the
way that Christians understand Christ’s atoning work to be an expiation for
human sin:
Again and again he said, “Are you happy, Jane?” And again and
again I answered, “Yes.” After which he murmured, “It will
atone—it will atone. Have I not found her friendless, and cold,
and comfortless? Will I not guard, and cherish, and solace her? Is
there not love in my heart and constancy in my resolves? It will
expiate at God’s tribunal. I know my Maker sanctions what I do.
For the world’s judgment—I wash my hands thereof. For man’s
opinion—I defy it.”15
This picture of Edward atoning for sin through his love for Jane is clearly an
attempt to recast the sin he is committing as a Messianic act of self-sacrifice.
Edward believes his actions to be sanctioned by God, asserting that Jane’s
happiness will be adequate reparation for bigamy. He justifies the importance
of his role in Jane’s life by echoing John’s gospel: “I will not leave you com-
fortless: I will come to you.”16 Here Jesus asks the disciples to believe in him,
listing the benefits of doing so. Throughout this speech Edward presents
himself as the saint who has his eyes firmly fixed on Heaven, rejecting earthly
reputation in favor of the salvation he can bring to Jane. This is, nevertheless,
a disordered image of a Messianic mission: the committing of a sin in order to
atone for a wrong. In justifying bigamy in this way, Edward displays spiritual
pride. In washing his hands of the “world’s judgment,” he echoes Pilate’s self-
absolution and complicity in the crucifixion in Matt. 27:24.
Edward’s general inclination is to identify Jane as his Messiah, rather
than present himself as Messianic. Jane, his “angel” and “comforter,” causes
him to be “healed and cleansed,”17 just as Jesus heals and cleanses the sick as
a metaphor for his healing and cleansing the human race of its sin.18 Yet Jane
never accepts Edward’s description of her as Messianic: “Mr. Rochester, you
must neither except nor exact anything celestial of me, — for you will not get
it, any more than I shall get it of you; which I not at all anticipate.”19 In spite
of her reluctance to accept the role of Edward’s Savior, in this conversation
Jane uses a phrase highly reminiscent of Jesus talking of the nature of his
relationship to his disciples in John’s Gospel: “For a little while you will
perhaps be as you are now,—a very little while; and then you will turn cool.”20
Compare with John’s Gospel:
40 Essaka Joshua
Then said Jesus unto them, Yet a little while am I with you, and
then I go unto him that sent me. . . . A little while, and ye shall not
see me: and again, a little while, and ye shall see me, because I go
to the Father. Then said some of his disciples among themselves,
What is this that he saith unto us, A little while, and ye shall not
see me: and again, a little while, and ye shall see me: and, Because
I go to the Father? They said therefore, What is this that he saith,
A little while? We cannot tell what he saith. Now Jesus knew that
they were desirous to ask him, and said unto them, Do ye enquire
among yourselves of that I said, A little while, and ye shall not see
me: and again, a little while, and ye shall see me?21
These are similarities that could hardly have been missed by readers from a
Biblically literate culture. Perhaps the echo of John’s Gospel indicates that
on some level Jane accepts Edward’s worship of her as his Savior, but Jane
ostensibly distances herself from Edward’s misunderstanding of her role.
Later, after the aborted wedding and Jane is in flight, she is tempted for a
moment to think herself into this role as Edward’s Savior: “I could go back
and be his comforter—his pride; his redeemer from misery; perhaps from
ruin.”22 But Jane rejects this and continues her journey. Redeeming is obvi-
ously a Messianic function; but so too is comforting according to John 14:18
“I [ Jesus] will not leave you comfortless; I will come to you.”23
Jane, too, begins to see Edward in a God-like role:
My future husband was becoming to me my whole world; and more

than the world: almost my hope of heaven. He stood between me
and every thought of religion, as an eclipse intervenes between
man and the broad sun. I could not, in those days, see God for his
creature: of whom I had made an idol. 24
This is precisely the dysfunction that the novel urges its readers against. The
passage marks a crucial change in Jane’s view of Edward. Just as Edward has
inclined to view Jane in Messianic terms, he is now her Messiah, her God,
and, as Jane realizes but is powerless to avoid, he has replaced her Christian
belief with, indeed, something altogether more “pagan.”25
The novel provides several other hints that the developing love between
Jane and Edward is in conflict with sound religion, irrespective of the bigamy
that any marriage would involve. One theme that runs through the scenes
between Edward and Jane in volume 2 is that of the Fall: as the relationship
between Edward and Jane develops, the narrator brings in imagery of the
Garden of Eden, and reports Edward as likening Jane to Eve. Most strikingly,
Edward’s proposal of marriage takes place in a metaphorical Eden, complete
with fruit. Jane describes the scene in great detail. It begins with an opulent
mid-summer sun setting at the “sweetest hour of the twenty-four,” “burning
with the light of a red jewel.”26 Jane walks into the garden at Thornfield and,
as the change in tense indicates, she becomes absorbed in her memory of her
encounter with Edward:
I went apart into the orchard. No nook in the grounds was more
sheltered and more Eden-like; it was full of trees, it bloomed with
flowers: a very high wall shut it out from the court. . . . I look round
and I listen. I see trees laden with ripening fruit. I hear a nightingale
warbling in a wood half a mile off; no moving form is visible, no
coming step audible; but that perfume increases: I must flee. I make
for the wicket leading to the shrubbery, and I see Mr. Rochester
entering. . . . He strolls on, now lifting the gooseberry-tree branches
to look at the fruit, large as plums, with which they are laden; now
taking a ripe cherry from the wall; now stooping towards a knot of
flowers, either to inhale their fragrance or to admire the dew-beads
on their petals. A great moth goes humming by me; it alights on a
plant at Mr. Rochester’s foot: he sees it, and bends to examine it.27
It is not hard to see the point here. The scene takes place in Eden, and
Edward has already eaten the fruit. The month, which makes a further
appearance later in the scene, is used frequently in the Bible to indicate
destruction: “Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth
and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal, but lay
up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth cor-
rupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal”; “Sell that ye have,
and give alms; provide yourselves bags which wax not old, a treasure in the
heavens that faileth not, where no thief approacheth, neither moth cor-
rupteth.”28 There are perhaps echoes, in the passage quoted, of the Song of
Solomon 4:12–15, 5, a feature that may be relevant given the long Christian
identification of the male lover in this poem with Christ: perhaps another
instance of Jane’s implied idolization of Edward. The honey, fruit, flowers,
fragrance, enclosed garden and latched door are present in both.
Representing Thornfield as Eden alludes to the post-lapsarian nature
of Edward and Jane. When Adam and Eve are cast out from paradise they
live amongst thorns: “thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and
thou shalt eat the herb of the field.”29 Edward is a kind of Eve, tempting
Jane; he also sees Jane as Eve. Edward’s proposal of marriage addresses Jane
in terms reminiscent of the language used to describe Eve in Genesis: “I ask
you to pass through life at my side—to be my second self, and my best earthly
companion”; “I love you as my own flesh.”30 Compare Genesis:
42 Essaka Joshua
And the Lord God said, It is not good that the man should be
alone; I will make him an help meet for him. And Adam said, This
is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called
Woman, because she was taken out of Man. . . . Therefore shall a
man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife:
and they shall be one flesh.31
A little later, Edward ironically speculates that Jane wants half of his estate.
His advice against this warns her not to be an Eve, a poisoner of their good
relations; Jane playfully replies in a way that makes it clear that she is, or
could be, not only this but something more: Edward’s tempter, and someone
who can vanquish him:
“You are welcome to all of my confidence that is worth having,

Jane: but for God’s sake, don’t desire a useless burden! Don’t long
for poison — don’t turn out a downright Eve on my hands!”
“Why not, sir? You have just been telling me how much you
like to be conquered, and, how pleasant overpersuasion is to you.
Don’t you think I had better take advantage of the confession,
and begin and coax, and entreat—even cry and be sulky if neces-
sary—for the sake of a mere essay of my power?”32
Both of them, of course, are too late: Jane has, albeit unwittingly, tempted
Edward, and he has already eaten the fruit.
The novel’s suggestions that the whole marriage proposal and the
relationship that develops are like the Fall of mankind are paralleled by
another equally disturbing set of images at this point: that Jane is a witch, an
image that its itself carefully grounded in Biblical texts. The story of Samson
is alluded to, with Jane explicitly likening herself to Delilah:
“. . . The conquest I undergo has a witchery beyond any triumph

I can win. Why do you smile, Jane? What does that inexplicable,
that uncanny turn of countenance mean?”
“I was thinking, sir (you will excuse the idea; it was involuntary),
I was thinking of Hercules and Samson with their charmers—”
“You were, you little, elfish—”33
And a little later Jane reports, “He said I was a capricious witch.”34
Witches place charms and spells on their victims, and in this case the charm
is entirely to make Jane into a goddess.
The most curious Messianic allusion, very different from the sort
of reference that I have been considering so far, occurs during the night-
time visit of Edward’s mad wife to Jane’s bedroom on the night before the
marriage ceremony:
. . . Presently she took my veil from its place; she held it up, gazed
at it long, and then she threw it over her own head, and turned to
the mirror.
. . . It removed my veil from its gaunt head, rent it in two parts, and
flinging both on the floor, trampled on them.35
The reference here is to Jane’s wedding veil, but the whole passage is
reminiscent of the tearing of the Veil of the Temple that according to the
Gospels was torn either just before or during Jesus’ death: “The veil of the
temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom.”36 For Christians, this
symbolizes the end of the Old Law, the Law that St. Paul identifies as lead-
ing to sin and deserved condemnation. The destruction of the wedding veil
symbolizes and anticipates very neatly the narrator’s subsequent assessment
of this sinful, bigamous marriage: it is only when both the marriage and the
disordered relationship between Jane and Edward are abandoned that both
characters can order their affections in such a way that they can form a suc-
cessful bond.
The events immediately after the interrupted marriage ceremony include
several relevant Biblical references. Most interesting are the quotations from
Psalms 22 and 69 that Jane makes immediately after the failed wedding
ceremony:
“Be not far from me, for trouble is near: there is none to
help.”37
In truth “the waters came into my soul; I sank in deep mire: I felt
no standing; I came into deep waters; the floods overflowed me.”38
The quotations from these psalms are placed at the end of volume 2, empha-
sizing their significance as a watershed. The first verse of Psalm 22, “My
God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me,” is one of Jesus’ “last words” on the
Cross, and the whole psalm is traditionally understood as Christological—
indeed, as specifically related to Christ’s crucifixion.39 Psalm 22:18 is alluded
to at other points in the Passion narratives.40 Psalm 69 is also twice alluded
to in the Passion narratives.41 Again, these allusions have led Christians
standardly to want to interpret Psalm 69 christologically, and specifically as
related to Christ’s Passion. Given this, it is striking that Jane’s only scriptural
allusions immediately after the humiliation of the wedding ceremony are
to these two psalms, so closely associated with Christ’s passion and death.
Furthermore, Jane refers to Psalm 69 indirectly at this point in the narrative:
44 Essaka Joshua
“I seemed to have laid me down in the dried-up bed of a great river; I heard
a flood loosened in remote mountains, and felt the torrent come: to rise I had
no will, to flee I had no strength. I lay faint; longing to be dead.”42 Clearly,
these are strong descriptions of affliction and powerlessness in the face of the
adversity Jane is confronting.
The first page of volume 3, a dialogue internal to Jane, contains another
reference to Psalm 22:1 that in turn leads to a further Messianic allusion:
“Let me be torn way, then!” I cried. “Let another help me!”

“No; you shall tear yourself away; none shall help you: you shall,
yourself, pluck out your right eye; yourself cut off your right hand:
your heart shall be the victim; and you, the priest, to transfix it.”43
Here, Jane is, like Christ, priest and victim. Compare for example the Epistle
to the Hebrews:
But Christ being come an high priest . . . by his own blood he

entered in once into the holy place, having obtained eternal
redemption for us. . . . Christ . . . through the eternal Spirit offered
himself without spot to God.44
Jane is to follow Christ’s command according to Matt. 5:
Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not
commit adultery: But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a
woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already
in his heart. And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast
it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members
should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into
hell. And if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee:
for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish,
and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell. It hath been
said, Whosoever shall put away his wife, let him give her a writ-
ing of divorcement: But I say unto you, That whosoever shall put
away his wife, saving for the cause of fornication, causeth her to
commit adultery: and whosoever shall marry her that is divorced
committeth adultery.45
It is significant that Jane’s potentially adulterous relationship with Edward

is alluded to here. Margaret Smith notes that “the exhortation to purify by
self-mutilation occurs elsewhere in the gospels, but significantly it is in this
particular passage that it is associated with condemnation of adultery.”46
Joseph Prescott understands “the verses as a commentary on the intended

adultery, and actual maiming of Rochester.”47 Jane tears herself from the man
who loves her “as [his] own flesh.”48
Reading these passages from Jane Eyre is difficult. On the one hand,
the close association of Jane with these Messianic texts could lead the reader
to suppose that she is still being portrayed in a fundamentally negative light.
Jane’s departure, for instance, is linked to Edward’s redemption.49 On the other
hand, it is quite clear that the references alluded to are associated with the
beginning of Jane’s “redemption”: her immediate departure from Thornfield
and her subsequent suffering. Presumably, the point is that Jane already
perceives that the correct course of action is not to be Edward’s Messiah. It
is, rather, to be Christ-like in a theologically acceptable way: to “take up her
cross and follow [Christ].”50 As we shall see below, this is precisely how St.
John Rivers, in his final letter from the mission-field, presents to Jane the
Christian’s duty, and in spite of St. John’s defects, it is quite clear that this is
how the narrator leads us to understand his mission too.
During these developments in Jane’s religious personality, Edward fails to
change in any way. He twice alludes to himself as damned. During the wedding
ceremony itself, he notes that his attempted bigamy sends him to Hell:
Mr. Rochester continued, hardily and recklessly: “Bigamy is an

ugly word!—I meant, however, to be a bigamist: but fate has out-
manœuvred me; or Providence has checked me,—perhaps the last.
I am little better than a devil at this moment; and, as my pastor
there would tell me, deserve no doubt the sternest judgments of
God,—even to the quenchless fire and deathless worm.”51
Edward sees himself as lost. Jane’s morally prudent decision to leave leads to
earthly wretchedness for him, and his own actions have led to his spiritual
damnation. Jane attempts to redirect him: “Do as I do: trust in God and
yourself. Believe in heaven. Hope to meet again there.”52 Edward rejects this
heavenly goal, accusing Jane directly: “You condemn me to live wretched, and
to die accursed. . . . You snatch love and innocence from me? You fling me
back on lust for a passion—vice for an occupation?”53 Jane’s presence, then, is
seen by Edward as sufficient to save him from Hell and to guide him aright.
But this is, in Christianity, the role of Christ alone: Jane is still understood
by Edward in Messianic terms. Jane, contrariwise, has realized that the only
cure for their malaise is the renouncement of idolatry:
I was experiencing an ordeal: a hand of fiery iron grasped my

vitals. Terrible moment: full of struggle, blackness, burning! Not
a human being that ever lived could wish to be loved better than
46 Essaka Joshua
I was loved; and him who thus loved me I absolutely worshipped:

and I must renounce love and idol. One drear word compromised
my intolerable duty—“Depart!”54
The passage precisely parallels Jane’s comments on page 277, the moment
when she notes that she has made Edward her “idol”: the solution to their
disordered, potentially bigamous relationship, is to renounce this idolatry.
Jane counsels Edward accordingly: “I advise you to live sinless; and I wish you
to die tranquil.”55 Jane, from a Christian point of view (and thus, as I shall
argue, from the novel’s central point of view), does not fall into idolatry as
rapidly as Edward, and begins to escape from it more quickly.
Almost immediately after Jane’s initial abandonment of this idolatrous
attitude, she feels an assurance of Edward’s well-being too, an assurance that
originates not from her own idolatrous worship of Edward, but from her well-
ordered worship of God. Jane discovers this as she wanders across the moor.
Worn out with this torture of thought, I rose to my knees. Night

was come, and her planets were risen: a safe, still night; too serene
for the companionship of fear. We know that God is everywhere;
but certainly we feel His presence most when His works are on the
grandest scale spread before us: and it is in the unclouded night-sky,
where His worlds wheel their silent course, that we read clearest His
infinitude, His omnipotence, His omnipresence. I had risen to my
knees to pray for Mr. Rochester. Looking up, I, with tear-dimmed
eyes, saw the mighty milky-way. Remembering what it was—what
countless systems there swept space like a soft trace of light—I felt
the might and strength of God. Sure was I of His efficiency to save
what He had made: convinced I grew that neither earth should per-
ish, nor one of the souls it reassured. I turned my prayer to thanksgiv-
ing: the Source of Life was also the Saviour of Spirits. Mr. Rochester
was safe: he was God’s and by God would he be guarded.56
The block between Jane and God that Edward had become is now removed:
precisely as the result of Jane’s disavowal of her idolatry. The right ordering of
her relationship to God has as its consequence the well-being of Edward, and
thus perhaps the inchoate possibility of a right relationship with Edward too.
Jane cannot be Edward’s Savior; but God can. In this wilderness, Jane takes
on the role of John the Baptist, rather than that of Christ who is tempted by
Satan in the wilderness.
Behold, I send my messenger before thy face, which shall prepare

thy way before thee. The voice of one crying in the wilderness,
Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make his paths straight. John did
baptize in the wilderness, and preach the baptism of repentance for
the remission of sins.57
Making Biblical allusions, Jane calls the moor as a “wilderness” and a

“golden desert.”58 John feeds on locusts and wild honey, whereas Jane eats
wild “bilberries.”59 Jane’s own healing takes time: even when she has explicitly
abandoned her idolatry, she, like St. John Rivers (who is presented physically
as a potential idol with his “Greek face”60), has further religious development
to undergo:
I was sure St. John Rivers—pure-lived, conscientious, zealous as

he was—had not yet found that peace of God which passeth all
understanding: he had no more found it, I thought, than had I;
with my concealed and racking regrets for my broken idol and lost
elysium—regrets to which I have latterly avoided referring; but
which possessed me and tyrannized over me ruthlessly.61
Jane’s renunciation of idolatry is more complete than her renunciation of the

idol and the false heaven that he has promised.
But Edward is not the only idol that Jane is in danger of worshiping. The
powerful influence of St. John Rivers presents itself to her as a further, serious
temptation to idolatry, and it is only after this idolatry is resisted that Jane’s
relationship with Edward is restored. I will discuss St. John’s troubled role in
the novel in the final section below. But it needs to be made clear that one of
the reasons for the problematic status of St. John is Jane’s disordered attitude
towards him, an attitude that he has encouraged as much as Edward caused
her earlier idolatry.
Jane begins by equating St. John’s physical beauty with his spiritual
beauty, understanding her relationship to her idol in these terms. In taking on
St. John as her mentor, Jane tries to emulate him. Jane’s inability to become
beautiful is seen by her as a metaphor for her inability to achieve the physical
and spiritual perfection that St. John stands for:
He wanted to train me to an elevation I could never reach: it

racked me hourly to aspire the standard he uplifted. The thing was
as impossible as to mould my irregular features to his correct and
classic pattern, to give my changeable green eyes the sea blue tint
and solemn lustre of his own.62
St. John’s role as an idol is perhaps emphasized more so even than Edward’s,
in that it is an overtly religious choice that Jane is making. Marriage to St.
48 Essaka Joshua
John is presented to her as a spiritual decision. At this point in her troubled

relationship with this pseudo-Messianic figure, St. John dominates Jane
in the same way that Edward manages to, and this is highlighted in the
repetition of the reference to the healing of the centurion’s servant. St. John
uses Matt. 8:9 (= Luke 7:7–8), as Edward has done previously: “When he
said ‘go,’ I went; ‘come,’ I came; ‘do this,’ I did it.”63 Jane is confused when
confronted with this degree of authority. In presenting herself as the sick
servant, and St. John as the centurion, Jane hints that she is aware that St.
John should not stand in place of the Messiah. Nevertheless, Jane is bat-
tling with the confusion that the religious element of his authority presents.
Even though Jane hints here that she is waiting for the real Messiah to heal
her, realizing that St. John, in spite of his authority, is not to be seen as a
Messianic figure, she is tempted to make an idol of him, as the following
passage confirms:
By straining to satisfy St. John till my sinews ache, I shall satisfy

him—to the finest central point and farthest outward circle of
his expectations. If I do go with him—if I—do make the sacri-
fice he urges, I will make it absolutely: I will throw all on the
altar—heart, vitals, the entire victim. He will never love me; but
he shall approve me.64
The language here is of sacrifice: a sacrifice not on behalf of St. John, but to
him; it is an attempt to earn his approval. But the offering of sacrifices to
creatures is the paradigm case of idolatry in the Old Testament.65
Indeed, St. John himself equates Jane’s refusal of him with her damnation,
as if he himself is not just one possible route to the salvific work of Christ, but
that work itself. On the night before St. John’s departure for Cambridge, he
begins family prayers by reading Rev. 21:7-8:
“He that overcometh shall inherit all things; and I will be his God,
and he shall be my son. But,” was slowly, distinctly read, “the fear-
ful, the unbelieving, & c., shall have their part in the lake which
burneth with fire and brimstone, which is the second death.”
Henceforward, I knew what fate St. John feared for me.66
The next morning, St. John leaves Jane a note that explicitly identifies mar-
riage to him, and the subsequent missionary work, with salvation: “You left
me too suddenly last night. Had you stayed longer, you would have laid your
hand on the Christian’s cross and the angel’s crown.”67 Jane rejects St. John’s
offer because she rightly perceives that his understanding of human love is
deficient: “I scorn your idea of love”68—partly because it is insufficiently
emotional, but, more importantly, because it fails to value Jane as the dis-
tinct human being that she is:
There would be recesses in my mind which would be only mine,

to which he never came; and sentiments growing there fresh and
sheltered, which his austerity could never blight, nor his measured
warrior-march trample down: but as his wife—at his side always,
and always restrained, and always checked—forced to keep the
fire of my nature continually low, to compel it to burn inwardly
and never utter a cry, though the imprisoned flame consumed vital
after vital—this would be unendurable.69
St. John accepts only one part of Jesus’ two-fold love commandment: he
loves God, but not his neighbor. This notion of love is almost as disordered
as that of the idolatrous characters earlier in the novel. Equally, Jane’s refusal
of St. John marks her final salvation from the dangers of idolatry.
The night before St. John’s departure, Jane hears Edward’s voice calling
from afar, and experiences a Mighty Spirit: not Edward (though she hears his
voice too) but God himself, and from this point in the novel all relationships
are rightly ordered: all idolatry has been definitively forsaken, but not at the
expense of well-ordered human relationships:
I seemed to penetrate very near a Mighty Spirit; and my soul

rushed out in gratitude at His feet. I rose from the thanksgiv-
ing—took a resolve—and lay down, unscared, enlightened—eager
but for the daylight.70
The experience is indeed redemptive. Jane is as if liberated from prison:
The wondrous shock of feeling had come like the earthquake which
shook the foundations of Paul and Silas’s prison: it had opened the
doors of the soul’s cell, and loosed its bands—it had wakened it out
of its sleep, whence it sprang trembling, listening, aghast.71
This redemption coincides completely with Edward’s repentance, his

explicit acceptance of God and God’s justice. His blindness symbolizes the
abandonment of idolatry, and is thus not emasculation or castration, as has
been suggested elsewhere, but a positive symbol for his religious well-being.
Edward describes his conversion:
“He [God] sees not as man sees, but far clearer: judges not as
man judges, but far more wisely. I did wrong: I would have sullied
50 Essaka Joshua
my innocent flower—breathed guilt on its purity: the Omnipotent

snatched it from me. I, in my stiff-necked rebellion, almost cursed
the dispensation: instead of bending to the decree, I defied it. Divine
justice pursued its course; disasters came thick on me: I was forced to
pass through the valley of the shadow of death.—His chastisements
are mighty; and one smote me which has humbled me for ever. . . . Of
late, Jane—only of late—I began to see and acknowledge the hand
of God in my doom. I began to experience remorse, repentance; the
wish for reconciliation to my Maker. I began sometimes to pray: very
brief prayers they were, but very sincere.”72
The valley of death provides no comfort here, unlike that of Psalm 23; God’s
staff provides no comfort to Edward, only punishment (“Yea, though I walk
through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art
with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me”).73 Nevertheless, the rhetoric
is thoroughly Christian—indeed the stress on the divine dispensation and
decree is characteristic of orthodox Calvinism. The scene ends with frag-
ments of Edward’s thoroughly traditional prayer:
“I thank my Maker, that in the midst of judgment he has remem-

bered mercy. I humbly entreat my Redeemer to give me strength to
lead henceforth a purer life than I have done hitherto!”74
One curious feature of this scene is the narrator’s comparison of herself to the
Virgin Mary, quoting Mary’s words: “I kept these things . . . and pondered them
in my heart.”75 Perhaps we are to think of Jane as ultimately the person whose
actions lead Edward back to orthodox religion and non-idolatrous human rela-
tionships? We should recall too Jane’s role as mediator between Edward and the
world during his blindness: “I was then his vision, as I am still his right hand.”76
Immediately after this scene, the final chapter opens with Jane’s famous sum-
mary of subsequent events: “Reader, I married him.”77 So the abandonment of
idolatry, the refusal to treat other human beings as though they have any sort
of Messianic function, leads to the resolution of the plot.
Central to this analysis is the identification of Edward, St. John,
and Jane as false Messiahs. Other characters, including Jane as a child,
occasionally receive something like Messianic status in ways that lack
negative implications. The very young Jane suffers in a way that is likened
to the sufferings of Jesus. The elder Jane—the narrator of the story—
comments about her treatment at the hand of her guardian, Mrs Reed: “I
ought to forgive you, for you knew not what you did: while rending my
heart-strings, you thought you were only up-rooting my bad propensities.”78
“Father forgive them; for they know not what they do” is said by Jesus on
the Cross.79 Jane’s comment apparently ascribes to herself a Messianic role.

But this comment is from the older Jane, from someone who, like the first
Christian martyr, Stephen, can use Christ’s words from the cross merely as
a way of following the example of Jesus.80 There is no idolatry here, merely
the practice of Christian virtue.
The only real exception is the remarkable Helen Burns. Helen Burns is
identified as a Christ-like figure by means of some implicit scriptural quotation
found in Jane’s first conversation with her, a conversation that takes place on
the same day that she has seen Helen flogged. Jane is puzzled that Helen does
not want to retaliate. Helen immediately cites Jesus’ teaching: “The Bible bids
us return ‘good for evil,’”81 and implicitly places herself in the role of recounting
Jesus’ teachings: “Learn from me,” she exhorts Jane, just as Christ exhorts
his disciples “learn of me.”82 Helen proceeds to teach Jane the message of
forgiveness, distancing herself from being perceived as Messianic:
“Read the New Testament, and observe what Christ says, and
how he acts—make his word your rule, and his conduct your
example.”
“What does he say?”
“Love your enemies; bless them that curse you; do good to them
that hate you and despitefully use you.”83
Charles I, too, one of the subjects of the conversation, is presented by

Helen as a type of Christ, a “murdered king,” whose “enemies were the worst:
they shed blood they had no right to shed.”84 The words Helen uses to describe
the martyrdom of Charles I echoes those used for Jesus, whose enemies are
described as shedding innocent blood. Pilate says “I have sinned in that I have
betrayed the innocent blood.”85 This is a way of further presenting Helen in
the role of someone who reports Jesus’ teachings. Why is Helen Burns not a
false Messiah? Helen is not a substitute for Christ in the sense of being an
idolized object of adoration. She merely takes on Christ’s teaching role, and
can represent Christ in this way without thereby becoming the object of an
idolatrous and dysfunctional devotion—the very problem exhibited by the
other Christ-like characters.
3
Jane Eyre presents idolatry as sinful, and the eradication of this kind of
worship as necessary for well-ordered human relationships. The novel
does not, however, counsel that human relationships should be abandoned
altogether; it suggests that relationships should not stand in the way of the
worship that is due to God. If this is the message of the novel, then it is a
52 Essaka Joshua
standard orthodox Christian one which was readily available to Charlotte

Brontë herself.
A similar message can be found, for example, in Isaac Watts’s volume,
Discourses of the Love of God (1729). This has a section on “Rules to moderate
excessive Love to Creatures”:
Set up the Love of God supreme in your Heart, and keep it so.
This Principle of divine Love will grow jealous if any meaner Love
rise too high, and become its Rival, or make too near Approaches
to its Seat and Throne. A sovereign Love to God will limit and
moderate all inferior Love. . . . Remember that excessive Love to
the Creatures hath often provoked a jealous God to embitter them
to us terribly by remarkable Providences, or to cut them off sud-
denly in his Anger. The way to keep our Comforts, is to love them
with Moderation.86
Watts’s work was well-known to the Brontës.87 Watts preaches not

that human relationships are wrong, but that they are liable to fail if
they are pursued at the expense of love for God. The doctrine can also
be found in an interesting collection of sermons by the anti-Calvinist
G. W. Woodhouse, published in 1839 and owned by Patrick Brontë (and
thus readily accessible to Charlotte at Haworth). The subject of Sermon
IV (“The Gracious Permission. Col. 3.2”) is salvation, and Woodhouse’s
point is that a person’s salvation depends on his or her truly “prefer[ring]
the anticipation of heavenly joy to all the passing pleasures and promises
of the present life.”88
If it were possible to believe that all of us were saved, the hope of

the future would be a glorious hope. If, without any misgiving or
uncertainty, we were assured, that as we have often met together
in peace in this house of prayer, so hereafter we should all meet
together in peace in the presence of God, joyful indeed would be
to us the prospect of eternity. In that case we should have little
difficulty in complying with the admonition of the text [Col. 3.2:
“Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth”],
and setting our affection on things above. Our prayer would then
be the expression of our heart’s sincere desire, when we said, “Thy
kingdom come”: “Come, Lord Jesus, come quickly.”89
Woodhouse avers that human relationships are good in themselves, and

that it is a good thing to value them. He does not believe, however, that
they should take the place of the Christian’s primary relationship with God.
He quotes, therefore, a passage emphasizing the centrality of Christ in

Christian salvation history, specifically the second coming, the thematically
crucial verse cited at the conclusion of Jane Eyre.90 Woodhouse later in the
same sermon makes the point about the centrality of Christ more explicit.
Salvation depends on
whether we seek for our good from the world, or seek it from God:
whether we live holy lives, or live in carelessness: whether we set
our affection of things above, or on things of the earth. It is but a
little while, and everything that is bright in this world will have
faded away. . . . If we lay up for ourselves treasures in heaven, and
spend our time on earth in the service of God, then, when Christ,
who is our life, shall appear, we shall appear with him in glory.91
It is, of course, precisely the combination of the polemic against idola-

try in daily life with the expectation of Jesus’ coming that marks out the
Messianism of Jane Eyre.
The application of these sorts of insights to human relationships—
even familial ones—is made more clearly in the letters of the Evangelical
and moderate Calvinist Henry Venn, whose biography and selected letters
were published in 1834. Venn believed Calvinism to be true, but unlike more
extreme Calvinists was unwilling to condemn those who did not. A copy of
Venn’s extremely popular and well-known Complete Duty of Man (1763) was
in the library at Ponden Hall, and thus possibly available to Charlotte.92 Venn
was the father of the Clapham Sect’s pastor, John Venn, and was counted
among those Evangelical clergyman admired by Patrick Brontë.93 Venn’s
letters include insights that seem very close to the kind of view that Jane Eyre
seems to defend. The newly married Venn writes to his wife, Eling, in the
following terms:
You will believe me, when I assure you it gives me great pleasure
to find you love me so tenderly. But you have need to beware, lest
I should stand in God’s place; for your expressions, “that you know
not how to be from me an hour without feeling the loss, & c.” seem
to imply something of this kind. My dearest E[ling], we must ever
remember that word which God hath spoken from Heaven: “Then
time is short: let those who have wives, be as if they had none; and
those who rejoiced, as if they rejoiced not.” Both for myself and
you, I would always pray that God may be so much dearer to us,
than we are to each other, that our souls in His love may “delight
themselves in fatness,” and feel He is an all-sufficient God. By this
means we shall most likely to continue together, and not provoke
54 Essaka Joshua
the stroke of separation by an idolatrous love to one another. But

this means we shall love one another in God and for God.94
Venn’s point is that the avoidance of idolatry in human relationships is nec-

essary for Christian love, and that such love should always be subordinated
to love for God.
Furthermore, the Christian redirection of human relationships
is counseled in The Maid of Killarney (1818), written by Brontë’s father,
Patrick. Here, conventional anti-Catholic polemic leads to a stress on the
sole mediatorship of Christ, and thus a rejection of the Catholic mistake
that would allegedly make Christ-like intermediaries of mere humans (i.e.,
priests). Nanny, the Catholic servant, in Patrick Brontë’s tale, is tended by
the Protestant Mr. MacFarsin; while on her death-bed, she comes to a new
(and Protestant) understanding of the importance of Christ as the sole
intermediary:
“But tell me, Nanny,” said Mr. MacFarsin, looking sorrow-

fully, “do you hope that these things [viz. “the Priest . . . the
wafer, that is . . . the body and blood of the blessed Jasus”] will
save you? Do you expect they will take you to heaven?”
Nanny, recovering herself a little, and speaking louder and
with greater emphasis, cried — “Ah! No—ah? No—nothing can
save me but Christ! Ah? No—nothing can save me but Christ!
In myself I am all sin, but Christ is good; and I believe in him,
and love him, and so God loves me, and makes me good.” 95
If my reading of these theological references in Jane Eyre is correct,

a central religious message of the novel is that earthly attachments cannot
substitute for loving God. This is a commonplace of Christian theology.
Brontë suggests, further, that love relationships are dysfunctional without
a correct love for Christ, but that in this context proper love for fellow
creatures is possible and wholly appropriate. St. John’s path is rejected by
Jane, not because he places too much emphasis on the role of Christ, but
because he overlooks the fact that prioritizing Christ does not entail refusing
to allow a secondary place for human affection too. Jane and Edward are
able to “love one another in God and for God.”96 St. John rightly exhorts
Jane to value Christ above all else. But he fails to see that this unconditional
love of God does not require the abandonment of earthly attachments. St.
John’s love for Jane is non-idolatrous; but it is not thereby well-ordered. St.
John’s battle with idolatry parallels that of Jane. Both reject it, but St. John
rejects human love as well. The extremity of St. John’s suppression of love is
seen when he observes Rosamond Oliver:
I saw his solemn eye melt with sudden fire, and flicker with resist-
less emotion. . . . His chest heaved once, as if his large heart, weary
of despotic constriction, had expanded, despite the will, and made
a vigorous bound for the attainment of liberty. But he curbed it, I
think, as a resolute rider would curb a rearing steed.97
St. John curbs his emotions like a despotic ruler, but they are not easily kept
in check. Jane understands St. John to have made a choice between loving
Rosamond and loving God, and presents what she imagines is St. John’s
internal monologue as an explication of his decision to renounce his love
for Rosamond:
“I love you, and I know you prefer me. It is not despair of success that
keeps me dumb. If I offered my heart, I believe you would accept it.
But that heart is already laid on a sacred altar: the fire is arranged
round it. It will soon be no more than a sacrifice consumed.”98
The likeness Jane paints of Rosamond offers a further temptation to St.

John. He gazes at the picture like an idolatrous Pygmalion, and as he
admires it the picture seems as if it comes to life: “It smiles!” he says.99 Jane
discomfits St. John by offering to paint him a copy to take with him on his
mission, asking:
“. . . would it be a consolation to have that memento in your

possession; or would the sight of it bring recollections calculated
to enervate and distress?”
He now furtively raised his eyes: he glanced at me irresolute,
disturbed: he again surveyed the picture.
“That I should like to have it is certain: whether it would be
judicious or wise is another question.”100
Worshiping the picture symbolizes the worship of Rosamond and, like Jane,
St. John struggles in his temptation by idolatrous love. This struggle is contin-
ued in his attempt to convert Hindus, whom he regards as idol worshipers.
St. John symbolizes merely a half of the novel’s main religious teaching.
His is, with regard to the relationship he proposes to undergo with Jane, an
extreme example of non-idolatrous love, but it is not an example of a well-
ordered love. St. John is unable to build a relationship with God’s creatures
into his relationship with God; he merely sees their usefulness. The novel
is suggesting, through the Messianic symbolism, that a love relationship
is wholly compatible with love for God, provided that it is non-idolatrous
(i.e., one in which the participants “love one another in God and for God”).
56 Essaka Joshua
Renouncing idolatry does not involve renouncing deep human relationships.

St. John is a symbol for the rejection of idolatry, but his thematic function
extends no further. Without him, the reader may not realize the centrality
of the polemic against idolatry. But his presence is not sufficient for the
full understanding of the novel’s religious significance. For this we need an
understanding of the relationship between Jane and Edward. Brontë’s allusion
to scripture explicates the development of this relationship, enabling us to
grasp the Christian significance of the characters and plot.
Jane reveals that St. John expects to stand before the throne of God
without fault, but is he without fault?101 His devaluing of his fellow creatures
suggests that he is not. St. John’s mission, Jane hints, is self-appointed; “He
entered on the path he had marked for himself; he pursues it still.”102 She
continues: “Himself has hitherto sufficed to the toil; and the toil draws near
its close: his glorious sun hastens to its setting.”103 The unusual syntax (using
“Himself ” as the subject) draws attention to St. John’s active role in his own
martyrdom. Jane is conscious of St. John’s spiritual pride: “His is the ambition
of the high master-spirit, which aims to fill a place in the first rank of those
who are redeemed from the earth.”104 No human stands between St. John and
“his sure reward, his incorruptible crown,” but Jane Eyre offers an alternative
and better calling: marriage, provided there is no danger of idolatry.105 St.
John’s fault is not his pride (though Jane is aware of his pride) but simply his
inability to find a right love towards creatures.
No t e s
1. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, edited by Jane Jack and Margaret Smith (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1969): p. 579 (vol. 3, ch. 12 [38]). All citations from Jane Eyre are
to this edition. Many of the Biblical references discussed here are noted in various
editions.
2. Marianne Thormählen, The Brontës and Religion (Cambridge University
Press, 1999): p. 217.
3. There are a few exceptions. As Hook and Tromly do not deal with the issue
in relation to relevant theological concerns, I do not discuss them further. See Ruth
Hook, “The Father of the Family,” Brontë Society Transactions, 17 (1977): p. 107;
Annette Tromly, The Lover of the Mask: The Autobiographers in Charlotte Brontë’s
Fiction, English Literary Studies Monograph Series, volume 26 (University of Victoria
Press, 1982): pp. 60–61.
4. Thormählen, The Brontës and Religion,\ p. 205.
5. Jane Eyre, 444 (vol. 3, ch. 3 [29]).
6. Caroly Williams, “Closing the Book: The Intertextual End of Jane Eyre,” in
Victorian Connections, edited by Jerome McGann (University Press of Virginia, 1989):
p. 83.
7. Felicia Gordon, A Preface to the Brontës (New York & London: Longman,
1989); Arthur Pollard, “The Brontës and Their Father’s Faith,” in Essays and Stud-
ies, edited by Raymond Chapman (London: John Murray; Atlantic Highlands, NJ:
Humanities Press, 1984).
8. Jerome Beaty, Misreading Jane Eyre: A Postformalist Paradigm (Ohio State
University Press, 1996): pp. 210–211.
9. Thormählen, The Brontës and Religion, p. 218.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid., pp. 218–219.
13. Jane Eyre, p. 151 (vol. 1, ch. 13).
14. Matt. 8:8–9 = Luke 7:7–8. All references are to the King James Version.
15. Jane Eyre, pp. 321–322 (vol. 2, ch. 8 [23]).
16. John 14:18.
17. Jane Eyre, p. 327 (vol. 2, ch. 9 [24]).
18. Mark 1:42; Luke 7:22; 1 John 1:7; Rev. 1:5.
19. Jane Eyre, p. 327 (vol. 2, ch. 9 [24]).
20. Ibid., my italics.
21. John 7:33; John 16:16–19; my italics.
22. Jane Eyre, 410 (vol. 3, ch.1 [27]).
23. See too Isa. 61:2, generally understood as Messianic in the light of Jesus’
use of part of the verse in Luke 4:19.
24. Jane Eyre, p. 346 (vol. 2, ch. 9 [24]).
25. Ibid., p. 344 (vol. 2, ch. 9 [24]).
26. Ibid., p. 311 (vol. 2, ch. 8 [23]).
27. Ibid., pp. 311–312 (vol. 2, ch. 8 [23]); my italics.
28. Matt. 6:19–20; Luke 12:33; see also Job 4:19, Job 13:28, Job 27:18, Ps.
39:11, Isa. 51:8, Hos. 5:12.
29. Gen. 3:18.
30. Jane Eyre, p. 319 (vol. 2, ch. 8 [23]); Jane Eyre, 320 (vol. 2, ch. 8 [23]).
31. Gen. 2:8; 23–24.
32. Jane Eyre, pp. 329–330 (vol. 2, ch. 9 [24]).
33. Ibid., p. 328 (vol. 2, ch. 9 [24]).
34. Ibid., p. 341 (vol. 2, ch. 9 [24]).
35. Ibid., p. 358 (vol. 2, ch. 10 [25]).
36. Mark 15:38; see too Matt. 27:51; Luke 23:43.
37. Jane Eyre, p. 374 (vol. 2, ch.11 [26]) and Ps. 22:11.
38. Jane Eyre, p. 375 (vol. 2, ch.11 [26]), adapted quotation of Ps. 69:1–2: “Save
me, O God; for the waters are come in unto my soul. I sink in deep mire, where there
is no standing: I am come into deep waters, where the floods overflow me.”
39. Matt. 27:46; Mark 15:34.
40. See Matt. 27:35; Mark 15:23; Luke 23:34, and explicitly quoted at John
19:24.
41. See Ps. 69:21, alluded to at Matt. 27:48, Mark 15:23 and Luke 23:36; and
Ps. 69:4, alluded to at John 15:25.
42. Jane Eyre, p. 374 (vol. 2, ch.11 [26]).
43. Ibid., p. 379 (vol. 3, ch. 1 [27]).
44. Heb. 9:11–12, 14.
45. Matt. 5:27–32; my italics.
46. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, edited by Margaret Smith, The World’s Classics
(Oxford University Press, 1975): pp. 468–469, note to p. 301.
58 Essaka Joshua
47. Ibid.
48. Jane Eyre, p. 320 (vol. 2, ch. 8 [23]).
49. See John’s Gospel: “Nevertheless I tell you the truth; It is expedient for
you that I go away: for if I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you; but
if I depart, I will send him unto you” ( John 16:7).
50. Mark 8:34.
51. Jane Eyre, p. 368 (vol. 2, ch. 9 [26]).
52. Ibid., p. 403 (vol. 3, ch. 1 [27]).
53. Ibid., pp. 403–404 (vol. 3, ch. 1 [27]).
54. Ibid., pp. 402–403 (vol. 3, ch. 1 [27]).
55. Ibid., p. 404 (vol. 3, ch. 1 [27]).
56. Ibid., p. 414 (vol. 3, ch. 2 [28]).
57. Mark 1:2–4.
58. Jane Eyre, p. 415 (vol. 3, ch. 2 [28]).
59. Ibid.
60. Ibid., p. 440 (vol. 3, ch. 3 [29]).
61. Ibid., pp. 449–450 (vol. 3, ch. 4 [30]); my italics.
62. Ibid., p. 509 (vol. 3, ch. 8 [34]).
63. Ibid., p. 508 (vol. 3, ch. 8 [34]).
64. Ibid., pp. 516–517 (vol. 3, ch. 8 [34]).
65. See Lev. 19:4, Lev. 26:1, Lev. 26:30, Deut. 29:17, 2 Kings 17:12, Isa. 2:8,
Hab. 2:18.
66. Jane Eyre, p. 532 (vol. 3, ch. 9 [35]).
67. Ibid., p. 538 (vol. 3, ch. 10 [36]).
68. Ibid., p. 522 (vol. 3, ch. 8 [34]).
69. Ibid., pp. 520–521 (vol. 3, ch. 8 [34]).
70. Ibid., p. 537 (vol. 3, ch. 9 [35]).
71. Ibid., p. 539 (vol. 3, ch. 10 [36]).
72. Ibid., p. 571 (vol. 3, ch. 11 [37]).
73. Ps. 23:4.
74. Jane Eyre, p. 573 (vol. 3, ch. 11 [37]).
75. Ibid., p. 573 (vol. 3, ch. 11 [37]), quoting Luke 2:19.
76. Ibid., pp. 576–577 (vol. 3, ch. 12 [38]).
77. Ibid., p. 574 (vol. 3, ch. 12 [38]).
78. Ibid., p. 19 (vol. 1, ch. 3).
79. Luke 23:34; for “rending my heart-strings,” see Joel 2:13.
80. See Acts 7:59 and Luke 23:46.
81. Jane Eyre, p. 63 (vol. 1, ch. 6).
82. Matt. 11:29.
83. Jane Eyre, p. 66 (vol. 1, ch. 6); quoting Matt. 5:44.
84. Ibid., p. 65 (vol. 1, ch. 6).
85. Matt. 27:4.
86. Isaac Watts, Discourses of the Love of God and the Use and Abuse of the Pas-
sions in Religion (London: J. Clark and R. Hatt; E. Matthews; R. Ford, 1729): pp.
70–71.
88. G. W. Woodhouse, Practical Sermons (London & Birmingham: J. G. and
F. Rivington; H. C. Langbridge; Wolverhampton: T. Simpson, 1846): pp. 2:53.
89. Ibid., 2:49.
90. Ibid.
91. Ibid., 2:63–64.
92. On the extent of Charlotte Brontë’s access to the library at Ponden Hall
see Juliet Barker, The Brontës (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1994): pp. 147–
148; Thormahlen, The Brontës and Religion, pp. 122 and 235, n. 6.
94. Henry Venn, The Life and a Selection from the Letters of the Late Rev. Henry
Venn, M. A. (London: John Hatchard, 1834): p. 69; my italics.
95. Patrick Brontë, “The Maid of Killarney; or Albion and Flora: A Modern
Tale in Which Are Interwoven Some Cursory Remarks on Religion and Politics,” in
Brontëana: The Reverend Patrick Brontë’s Collected Works, edited by J. Horsfall Turner
(Bingley: T. Harrison, 1898): p. 137.
96. Venn, Life, p. 69.
97. Jane Eyre, p. 465 (vol. 3, ch. 5 [31]).
98. Ibid., p. 469 (vol. 3, ch. 6 [32]).
99. Ibid., p. 474 (vol. 3, ch. 6 [32]).
100. Ibid., p. 474–475 (vol. 3, ch. 6 [32]).
101. Ibid., p. 578 (vol. 3, ch. 12 [38]).
102. Ibid.
103. Ibid.
104. Ibid.
105. Ibid.
K . C . B elliappa
Macauley’s “Imperishable Empire” and

“Nelly, I Am Heathcliff ” in
Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights1
A mong the great moments in life, looking at the list provided by Professor
CDN, I found that Macaulay’s concept of the “imperishable empire” was not
only worthy of discussion but also extremely relevant at this point of time.
Macaulay occupies a singularly important place in the history of India, for
it was he who clinched the debate in favour of the introduction of English
education in India. It was again Macaulay who formulated the Indian Penal
Code. Macaulay spoke of the imperishable empire in his address to the
House of Commons when it was debating on the transfer of power from
the East India Company to the Crown. I believe this address should be
read along with his well-known Minute on Indian Education. The usual
response to Macaulay is to valorize him as the man who gave us the Liberal
English Education which paved the way for India’s independence. I need not
to have labour the point as far as the positive influence of English educa-
tion on India is concerned. I would like to, for a change, look at the other
side of the coin since, in my considered opinion, it is time we did this. In
his passionate plea for English education in India, what strikes the reader
is the strategy adopted by Macaulay. As a distinguished historian, he offers
many historical parallels to plead for the study of English in India since the
fund was set apart for the “intellectual improvement of the people of this
country.” He speaks of the inherent superiority of the European system of
Journal of Indian Writing in English, Volume 30, Number 1 (Winter 2002): pp. 38–41.
61
62 K. C. Belliappa
knowledge and makes his now infamous remark that “a single shelf of a
good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and
Arabia.” There has perhaps never been a more glib and brazen dismissal of
the orient by a Westerner. This reminds us of Salman Rushdie’s dismissal
of Indian Literature in our regional languages vis-a-vis Indian Literature
in English made in a special number of The New Yorker in 1997. And how
can one even forget Macaulay’s strongly racist overtones in his plea for the
creation of “a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in
taste, in opinions, in morals and in intellect.” Macaulay was indeed pleading
for the creation of a class of Brown/Black Sahibs to act as intermediaries
between the rulers and the ruled. But the overriding emphasis in the minute
is on the backwardness of India and her people. Macaulay offers English
education as the sole panacea for all the ills of this “uncivilized” country. For
a more Eurocentric view of India, one cannot think of a better document
than Macaulay’s minute.
In many ways, his address at the House of Commons anticipates his
ideological position in the Minute. He remarks in a rather astounding fashion
that he would “rather trade with free people than govern savages.” Let me
quote his concluding remarks from his address at the House of Commons:
Are we to keep the people of India ignorant in order that we may

keep tham submissive? Or do we think that we can give knowl-
edge without awakening ambition’? Or do we mean to awaken
ambition and to provide it with no legitimate vent’? . . . It may be
that the public mind of India may expand under our system until
it has outgrown that system, that by good government we may
educate our subjects into a capacity for better government, that
having become instructed in European knowledge they may in
some future age, demand European institutions. Whether such a
day will ever come, I know not. Whenever it comes, it will be the
proudest day in English History. . . . The sceptre may pass away
from us. Victory may be inconstant to our arms. But there are tri-
umphs which is followed by no reverse. There is an empire exempt
from all natural cause of decay. These triumphs are the pacific
triumphs of reason over barbarism that empire is the imperish-
able empire of our arts and our morals, our literature and our laws.
(emphasis mine)
The imperishable empire he speaks of is of arts, of morals, of literature

and of laws. One cannot overlook the fact that they are all theirs, that is of
the English. No doubt we have gone beyond Macaulay’s original intentions
in that we have now perhaps realised the value of our arts, of our morals, of
Macauley’s “Imperishable Empire” and “Nelly” 63
our literature and of our laws. But it is important to remember that the Indian
Penal Code was essentially discriminatory in nature, in favour of the white
man. It is indeed sad that the very same Penal Code still rules the roost in our
courts of Law. We are only now waking up to the new realities and are in the
process of bringing in several amendments to the Indian Penal Code.
The logic behind Macaulay’s imperishable empire is not easy to miss
when he speaks of “the triumphs of reason over barbarism!” More than 50
years have elapsed since the collapse of the British Empire in India. But how
does one describe the present day scenario? we live today in a world where
Macaulay’s imperishable empire has taken not an altogether different form,
where the buzzword is Globalisation. As a result what we now have is the
alarming prospect of all of us thinking. living and behaving like citizens of the
world. We have imbibed Western values in all spheres of our lives and tend to
swear by them at every given opportunity. Whereas the need of the hour for
us is to assert our identity more strongly than even before in order to prevent
us from ending as faceless citizens of the world. We may think globally but we
have got to act locally. My fear is that Macaulay’s deeprooted empire is indeed
imperishable even though it has taken the form of American Imperialism
with institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund
dictating how we should live over lives. This is, in my view, far more dangerous
and insidious than the 200 years of colonial rule.
As for my great moment in Literature is concerned, it is the portrayal
of Catherine-Heathcliff relationship in Emily Bronte’s novel, Wuthering
Heights. Man-Woman relationship has fascinated writers from Shakespeare
to D. H. Lawrence. But most of these relationships are quite predictable in
nature. It is Catherine-Heathcliff relationship which is unique in the annals
of world literature, for it provides us with a disturbingly original and insightful
interpretation of Man-Woman relationship. And Wuthering Heights as a novel
is exceptional since it makes it difficult, if not impossible, to take a definite
view of life. The novel demonstrates how life is inexplicable, uncertain and
defies easy generalisation.
What is truly remarkable about Catherine-Heathcliff relationship
is not just its passionate intensity but the fact that their love is elemental
and enduring, always transcending the limits set by the social world. The
extraordinary nature of their relationship is expressed in one of the most
memorable passages in the novel:
. . . This is for the sake of one who comprehends in his person

my feelings to Edgar and myself. I cannot express it: but surely
you and everybody have an notion that there is, or should be, an
existence of yours beyond you. What were the use of my creation
if I were entirely contained here? My great miseries in this world
64 K. C. Belliappa
have been Heathcliff ’s miseries, and I watched and felt each from
the beginning. my great thought in living is himself. If all else
perished. and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all
else remained, and he were annihilated. the universe would turn to
a mighty stranger. I should not seem a part of it. My love for Lin-
ton is like the foliage in the woods. Time will change it, I’m well
aware, as winter changes; the trees. My love for Heathcliff resem-
bles the eternal rocks beneath– a source of little visible delight,
but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff — he’s always, always in my
mind — not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to
myself — but as my own being — so don’t talk of our separation
again — it is impracticable: and . . . . (Ch. IX).
It is evident from this confession that for Catherine her relationship with
Heathcliff is something more than love, passion, commitment; it is a craving,
a need of a more fundamental kind. It has clear metaphysical overtones in the
suggestion that a human being yearns for a vivifying contact with another in
order to achieve a sense of completeness. There is this sense of kinship and
identity between them and hence her remark, “Nelly, I am Heathcliff.”
In the light of this clear explication of the true nature of Catherine-
Heathcliff relationship, it is not difficult to understand why Catherine chooses
to marry Edgar. However, the general tendency among critics ranging from
Arnold Kettle to Terry Eagleton is to offer social and economic factors as
the major reasons for Catherine’s decision to marry Edgar in preference to
Heathcliff. They fail to realise that what makes Catherine an exceptional
woman is her profound conviction that her marriage with Edgar would
in no way affect her unique relationship with Heathcliff. Even a sensitive
critic like Q. D. Leavis, rather simplistically likens this to one who wants to
have her cake and eat it too. And in recent years, the Feminist approach to
Wuthering Heights has given us diverse readings of the novel. A representative
illustration of such a reading is found in The Mad Woman in the Attic by Sandra
M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar. They regard the novel as a female version of the
male bildungsroman and suggest that while “triumphant self-discovery” is the
goal of the male hero, it is “anxious self-denial” which is the “ultimate product
of female education.” They go on to remark that “what Catherine, or any girl,
must learn is that she does not know her own name, and therefore cannot
know either who she is or whom she is destined to be.” Such a sweepingly
one-sided account of Catherine’s femininity is hard to accept since she is
aware, even if partially, of what constitutes her true identity. It is important to
remember that Wuthering Heights can also be read as a metaphysical romance
with serious mystical overtones especially in relation to Catherine-Heathcliff
relationship. And this should make it apparent that this relationship clearly
Macauley’s “Imperishable Empire” and “Nelly” 65
transcends societal barriers. What is truly fascinating in the novel is Emily

Bronte’s questioning the very idea of individual identity as expressed in
unequivocal terms in Catherine’s assertion that she is Heathcliff.
No t e
1. Paper presented at the C. N. Sanjay Birth Anniversary Symposium on
“Great Moments in Life and Literature” at Dhvanyaloka on 8–9 November, 2001.
R ebecca F raser
Monsieur Heger: Critic or Catalyst

in the Life of Charlotte Brontë?
Text of the lecture given to the Brontë Society on 5 April 2003, at the Beverly
Arms Hotel, Beverley, Yorkshire.
At a time when Charlotte Brontë was out-growing her dependence on the

imaginary world of Angria, the stimulation provided by her experience of
Brussels and, particularly the discipline and challenges imposed by her teacher,
M. Heger, were instrumental in forming the great literature she subsequently
wrote. Evidence of this influence is manifest in all her novels.
A t the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Charlotte

Brontë’s greatest book Villette, it seems an appropriate moment to think about
Monsieur Heger’s effect on her life. Was he critic or catalyst? Can one argue
that without him there would not have been the books or the success? I do
not go in for ‘what might have beens’ in history. Charlotte Brontë’s drive and
determination must have got her and her family’s work published somehow.
Nevertheless I think that we must accord to Monsieur Heger an importance
he may secretly have allowed himself in the life of Charlotte Brontë — though
we have no way of knowing that! Charlotte Brontë would correctly prophesy
to Aunt Branwell when she pleaded for the financial help she needed to go
to Brussels, ‘I feel an absolute conviction that, if this advantage were allowed
us, it would be the making of us for life’.
Brontë Studies, Volume 28, Number 3 (November 2003): pp. 185–194. © The Brontë
Society 2001.
67
68 Rebecca Fraser
The ongoing success of the Brontë Society, which was founded as long
ago as 1893, testifies to the enduring appeal of the Brontë family, whose home
at Haworth is Britain’s most visited literary shrine. For many, the Brontë’s
personify a particularly British genius. Perhaps I should say particularly
Yorkshire genius. Despite their Cornish mother and Irish father, it is Haworth
and the untamed wilderness of Yorkshire that we most associate with the
name of the Brontës. For the Brontës Yorkshire qualities are not just to do
with the physical facts of a life spent on the edge of the Moors. It is also to do
with a certain freedom in the way that the Brontës wrote, which enchant us
now, and amazed people then.
Nevertheless, despite the very profound sense of Yorkshire in Charlotte
Brontë’s work, I believe that one must add that there was one very unusual
element in the cocktail of sensitive Celtic blood and Yorkshire soil. I am
standing on the very Yorkshire soil today that, a century and a half ago,
brought forth a family of rare genius. But, daringly, considering where I am, I
want to look at the place of a stranger in Charlotte Brontë’s life, of the effect
of going to Brussels on Charlotte Brontë’s writing. In my view, the foreign
land of Brussels and her teacher Constantin Heger had life-transforming
effects on Charlotte Brontë. They made the difference between success and
greatness, between what she herself called obscurity and becoming the toast
of the Victorian literary world.
Emily Brontë needed the profound isolation she sought for her writing
to flourish, but in Charlotte’s case it was different. Her writing, whose juvenilia
Mrs. Gaskell famously described as ‘creative power carried to the verge of
insanity’, needed something to peg her down to earth. The person who did
that was Monsieur Constantin Heger. Now you might argue, and many of
you have probably done so in the past, that Constantin Heger was simply
a teacher in a small Belgian school. How could he have helped the Brontë
genius flower? Let us look at what he was like and what he did for Charlotte
Brontë. I have called this lecture critic or catalyst, and I first want to look at
Monsieur Heger as Charlotte Brontë’s critic.
Why Belgium, why Brussels in the first place? Who or what was Monsieur
Heger, and what was the nature of the school destined to be immortalized by
Charlotte Brontë? Why, by 1841, was Charlotte casting around to find some
way of leaving her home for a while? Charlotte Brontë was a woman whom we
know from her writing was full of passionate desires and impulses; who was
highly intelligent and well read. Yet she was condemned to what to her and to
us must seem a very limited life. Other than teaching in schools, governessing
in private houses was really all that was on offer for women of intelligence in
the first half of the nineteenth century. If Charlotte Brontë were living today,
the most enormous variety of options would be open to her. She could have
fled her small village and gone to London. If she had attended university there
Monsieur Heger: Critic or Catalyst? 69
she would have met young people with the sort of ambitions she had. She
might have acted in or put on plays, in short been part of a supportive literary
community. In Charlotte’s case, although she had a supportive background
of dear friends in Yorkshire, they were so unlike her. The simply could not
understand her mentality and that made her feel very alienated. Throughout her
life, Charlotte Brontë suffered from periods of immense depression, which were
quite physically prostrating. When she was teaching at Roe Head she suffered a
serious illness brought on by a religious crisis and feelings of unworthiness.
Charlotte Brontë’s alienation was three stranded — it came from being
a woman, from being ambitious, and from having a secret world of writing
which had been her retreat ever since she was tiny. That world was an addictive
one, the depth of her attachment to which neither of her closest friends, Ellen
Nussey and Mary Taylor, could really understand. Only her family, Emily,
Anne, and Branwell, could empathize with it. But by 1841, Charlotte had
come to recognize the dangers her escapist world posed to her. She had really
set her back against Angria because she thought that it was consuming her. As
she would say to Ellen Nussey, if only Ellen knew her thoughts, ‘the dreams
that absorb me; and the fiery imagination that at times eats up and makes me
feel Society as it is, wretchedly insipid, you would pity and I dare say despise
me’. In the past she had got through the more pedestrian passages of her life by
going to what she called ‘the world below’. We all know the grip that world had
on her, how the Duke of Zamorna had been her ‘mental king’.
Sadly, by that date Charlotte Brontë had had enough experience of the
world to no longer have much faith that writing could ever be the stuff of her
life, of a woman’s life. She had been told so by the poet laureate himself, Robert
Southey, which only underlined the advice constantly given her in childhood
by her father, the Reverend Patrick Brontë. By 1840, although she was still
interested enough in being a writer to have approached Hartley Coleridge
for literary advice, she had, as she said, pretty well locked her manuscripts
away. She had tried governessing and loathed it for the condescension with
which governesses were treated. As was said at the time, governesses were
‘neither fish, nor fowl nor good red herring’, in that it was impossible for most
Victorian households to decide whether they were to be treated as members
of the family, or as servants.
Being a governess might not really have been an option in any case. The
volatile nature of Victorian finance, the speculation in railways and banking,
meant that bankruptcy was a constant spectre for the Victorian middle class.
Governess posts were actually becoming few and far between by the late
1830s. Opening their own school at Haworth was going to be the answer for
the Brontës. That was why Charlotte had begged Aunt Branwell to finance an
expedition to the continent so that she and Emily could learn some German,
master their French, and improve their Italian.
70 Rebecca Fraser
Why Brussels? Well there is a quick answer to that! It was because of

the Taylors. They were that family of vigorous men and women who would so
seem to represent the highest virtues of this country, its strength and its pride,
that Charlotte Brontë would even call them the Yorkes in her novel Shirley.
Mary Taylor was Charlotte’s friend and had the sort of intellectual fire and
brilliance that Charlotte herself possessed. A very articulate early feminist,
Mary Taylor would not only awaken a reluctant Charlotte to the prison-like
conditions middle class were living under in the 1840s; she would also write
a feminist novel and even emigrate to New Zealand, where to seek a more
active life did not seem like a derogation of class.
Mary Taylor’s father, who for most of his life had been a very successful
businessman with his own bank and the monopoly on army cloth manufacture
in the district, was evidently a perceptive and unusual man. He recognized
little Charlotte Brontë’s thirst to expand her literary boundaries beyond what
the Keighley Mechanics’ Institute could provide. He loaded her down with
bales of French novels, including the work of Georges Sand.
In the risky climate of the 1830s, where bankruptcy was a frequent hazard
of venture capitalism, Mr Taylor’s business collapsed. He died bankrupt, though
having honorably repaid all his creditors. The Taylors had been sufficiently
wealthy that attending school in Brussels was considered necessary to put the
finishing touches to the Taylor girls. Although a finishing school was not an
option for the daughters of a poor curate like the Reverend Patrick Brontë,
through the Taylors’ connection to Mrs Jenkins, the wife of the British Embassy
Chaplain whose brother came from the West Riding, another school was found
in the Rue d’Isabelle. Mrs Jenkins’ brother-in-law, the Reverend David Jenkins,
had many years before succeeded Patrick Brontë as curate of Dewsbury and
knew both Patrick Brontë and Ellen Nussey. Mrs Jenkins had heard that the
Pensionnat Heger was a superb school from an English ex-patriot acquaintance.
She had been governess to the French Princess who married the first King of
Belgium, King Leopold. Her granddaughter was currently being educated by
the excellent Hegers, a young couple with a growing family who also ran a
small boarding school, the Pensionnat Heger. Greatly in Brussels’ favour too,
as far as the Brontës were concerned, when every penny counted, was that
Belgium was well known to be half the price of Paris to live in. Moreover, the
Taylor sisters were there so all would not be strange.
So Charlotte, who as usual was the driving force behind all family
ventures, wrote off to the Pensionnat des Demoiselles run by the thirty-
eight year old Madame Heger to ask if she and Emily could be taken on as,
what were in effect, mature students to polish up their French and German.
Madame Heger’s husband, Constantin, was a professor at the prestigious
Brussels boys’ grammar school, the Athenée Royale, but he sometimes gave
lessons to the more promising pupils at his wife’s school. His presence on the
school premises of course made him the dominant figure there, particularly
as everyone who knew him agreed that he had an imposing and dramatic
personality which went with his dark Italianate looks. As Monsieur Heger
would tell Mrs Gaskell, he and had been so impressed by the simple and
earnest tone of Charlotte’s application that they decided to do a sort of
package deal for the Brontës, including all the extras in one specific sum.
What was Charlotte Brontë like when she arrived in Belgium? I think the
first thing to say was that she was craving instruction. Despite her intellectual
bent and wide reading, she was pretty well self-taught. What she had learnt at
Roe Head School was the bare minimum. Though it had given her a strong
moral grounding and a sense of discipline, which she had hitherto lacked in her
rather chaotic home, Charlotte was also yearning for intellectual and aesthetic
stimulus. Many of us might think of Brussels as rather mundane, full of chocolate
shops and about as thrilling as Switzerland. But to Charlotte Brontë, whose
response to painting and literature was so fervid and so feverish, so intense,
Brussels, with its ancient buildings and old churches, seemed a sort of Promised
Land. This was her response when Mary Taylor wrote her about Brussels:
Mary’s letter spoke of some of the pictures and cathedrals she

had seen—pictures the most exquisite—and cathedrals the most
venerable—I hardly know what swelled to my throat as I read her
letter— . . . Such a strong wish for wings . . . such an urgent wish
to see—to know—to learn—something internal seemed to expand
boldly for a minute—I was tantalised with the consciousness of
faculties unexercised—then all collapsed and I despaired.
When Charlotte arrived in Brussels, although she was twenty-six years

old, in many ways her ideas and attitudes were those of a far younger person.
She had led an extremely sheltered life at Haworth, and much of it in the
company of imaginary beings! She was looking to learn and expand her
horizons. She was ambitious, she wanted to rise in the world and having an
excellent school seemed the way to do it. We can imagine the two Brontë
sisters, after the long journey finally arriving at the Rue d’Isabelle. Despite
the dressmaking that made the Parsonage busy for weeks, their clothing
seemed quaint to those who met them at the school, and Monsieur Heger at
first probably felt rather sorry for them both. Emily was silent, difficult, and
apparently domineering, and the tiny Charlotte was very shy, although more
outgoing as she began to settle in. But after a while both Monsieur Heger and
Charlotte Brontë began increasingly to look forward to their lessons.
What was Monsieur Heger like, and who was he? Thirty-three years
old and descended from a family of Viennese jewellers whose ancestors
had moved to Germany two hundred years before, Heger had trained as a
72 Rebecca Fraser
barrister before becoming a teacher. He had also had a personal tragedy in his
life. His first wife and their only child had child had died during the cholera
epidemic that swept Brussels in 1833. Even allowing for some exaggeration
in his obituaries, it seems that Monsieur Heger was an extraordinary teacher
commonly agreed to possess ‘une sorte de magnetism intellectuel ’. Although
that grand old man of Victorian letters Leslie Stephen, the father of Virginia
Woolf, might dismiss him unkindly as an ‘Aeolus of the duck pond’, Monsieur
Heger was rather unique. As well as being exceptionally charismatic, he had a
passion for contemporary literature that he began to impart to his new pupils
once he had realized what sort of students he was dealing with. For although
the plan had been to drill les soeurs Brontës in grammar and vocabulary, he
rapidly saw that they had the capacity to cope with important French writing
and that it would not be enough for his wife to teach them. Thanks to the
good luck of destiny of encountering Monsieur Heger Charlotte at last was
subjected to strenuous interrogation by the intense Monsieur Heger as to
what made a piece of prose work and what did not.
All her life, Charlotte Brontë had read widely and enthusiastically but
without any real guidance. In Monsieur Heger she encountered the stern
critic she needed to make her look at literature with an academic eye, as
well as someone with beliefs as strong as her own. Like her father, Monsieur
Heger was determined to help educate factory workers by giving them evening
classes. As far as he was concerned, being a teacher was a real vocation. As
a writer Charlotte Brontë was in desperate need of discipline, as she had
become all too aware. Monsieur Heger supplied it and we can imagine lesson
after lesson as the man Charlotte at first privately called ‘an insane tom-cat’
railed at her and her sister for not properly applying their minds to what they
were reading. We also know from Charlotte’s exercise books in the British
Library of the very patient care that Monsieur Heger began to take over
Charlotte’s devoirs, so that he worked on her prose style with her and urged
her to abandon the redundant. Monsieur Heger also exposed Charlotte to
the best contemporary French literature. Thanks to him, Charlotte Brontë,
who was totally in tune with the ideas of the French Romantics and who
came to them with a sense of recognition, also learned from them. The way
they handled language, the inversion of syntax, the use of metaphor to express
meaning in a wholly new way, was peculiarly suited to her genius. As Enid
Duthie put in, ‘in French Romanticism’ Charlotte Brontë ‘found abundant
confirmation of her inborn sense that the novelist may also be a poet’.
The tutelage of M. Heger produced a new awareness in Charlotte of the
possibilities of prose style, and of the many effects one can make by varying
rhythm and language. Such debt did Charlotte feel to Monsieur Heger that she
would later say that she would like to write a book and dedicate it to him because
he had been her ‘Maitre de Literature’. He was the only master of literature she
had ever had, she would write in an excess of gratitude and enthusiasm. Like
the other two important male figures in her life, Monsieur Heger might have
helped Charlotte with her writing but he too very much counselled her against
becoming a writer. He might have helped refine her prose style but he was
also highly critical of her literary ambitions when she eventually outlined them
to him. His aim was that Charlotte Brontë should become a teacher, never a
writer. His general attitude towards the capabilities of the female sex, though
progressive in mid-nineteenth century terms, was not advanced enough to view
women as anything other then appendages of their husbands and children.
In many ways, despite Monsieur Heger’s appreciation of Charlotte’s work,
he was a critic in the sense that he was one more restraining voice added to the
chorus of disapproval concerning her ambitions to be a writer. We know from
the presence of some Angrian manuscripts which turned up on a stall in Brussels
at the beginning of the twentieth century (Charlotte had obviously brought
them from Haworth to show to Monsieur Heger), that those ambitions were
not quite dead, even in Brussels. How could they ever be entirely?
I believe that, more importantly, Monsieur Heger was also a catalyst. I
use the word advisedly. Monsieur Heger was like a chemical flung into the
fermenting mixture of Charlotte Brontë’s mind, which had an extraordinary
effect. And of course if one was a scientist hypothesizing what the outcome
of an experiment would be if one took a brilliant teacher and a passionate
pupil, one might predict that the pupil would fall in love with the teacher.
What happened was still more interesting. For somehow back in Yorkshire,
deprived of Monsieur Heger’s presence, an astonishing reaction took place
in the rich and intense imagination of Charlotte Brontë, where that inner
life compensated for the poverty of daily existence. Charlotte Brontë never
wrote as honestly as she did in The Professor. ‘Belgium! Name unromantic and
unpoetic, yet name that whenever uttered has in my heart an echo, such as
no other assemblage of syllables, however sweet and classic, can produce . . .
Belgium . . . It stirs my world of the past like a summons to resurrection.’
From then onwards, Belgium and Monsieur Heger were dwelt on
obsessively. As she would write, the physiognomy, the lineaments, of Belgium,
and indeed the Rue d’Isabelle and Monsieur Heger, were burnt onto her
memory. Indeed, before Belgian developers bulldozed the Pensionnat and
destroyed a patch of literary history, earlier biographers armed with copies
of either The Professor or Villette could find their way round the Pensionnat
with ease. It was exactly the same. Although Charlotte’s four personal letters
to Monsieur Heger give some indication of her feelings after she reluctantly
returned from Brussels, how much more so do the novels. The Professor and
Villette are both set in Brussels at a slightly altered Pensionnat Heger, while
Shirley’s hero is half Flemish.
74 Rebecca Fraser
In the atmosphere of that small Yorkshire parsonage where creativity was

seemingly accelerated, something amazing happened. Monsieur Heger, who
was charismatic and distinguished but still a provincial schoolteacher, was
fused with Charlotte’s Byronic alter ego Zamorna that she had worshipped for
so long. Mr Rochester was born. Some critics have laughed at Mr Rochester.
One said he talked like a governess. Yet it was not a governess he spoke like,
but a teacher. For those members of the Brontë Society who have read those sad
little letters written after Charlotte’s return, begging for communication from
Brussels, there is something almost too painful about the tender descriptions
of Mr. Rochester in Jane Eyre. For he is really Monsieur Heger writ large.
‘My only master’, Charlotte Brontë called Monsieur Heger in her letters; ‘my
master’, Jane Eyre addresses Mr. Rochester.
The letters to Monsieur Heger breathe a kind of enchantment, which their
recipient must have had a heart of stone to resist. Yet resist he did — after all
he was most definitely a married man, the father of no less than five children.
And in response, Charlotte’s imagination, something she often seemed to have
believed almost had a life of its own, got to work and carried her away from her
unhappiness. The Thornfield section in Jane Eyre does give the impression of
being written in white heat. Monsieur Heger was transformed, transmogrified,
made broader, squarer:” ‘I knew my traveller’, Charlotte Brontë wrote, ‘with his
broad and jetty eyebrows, his square forehead, made squarer by the horizontal
sweep of his black hair. I recognized his decisive hose, more remarkable for
character than beauty . . . his grim mouth, chin and jaw—yes all three were very
grim and no mistake’. The famous erotic scene in the garden at Thornfield—no
cold English garden this—was the Pensionat’s garden transplanted, made by
Charlotte’s lyrical writing into a sort of Paradise.
We know that Charlotte Brontë began writing Jane Eyre as she stayed
in Manchester watching over her father after his eye operation. Her father
had so many similar qualities to M. Heger; force and power like his. As she
watched him apparently maimed, did something in her exult that in her
imagination at least she could wound Monsieur Heger, for as Mr. Rochester
he is blinded and wounded. I won’t say emasculated, though some more hard-
line feminist critics argue that that is what is going on.
Monsieur Heger is the catalyst in Charlotte Brontë’s life, in her
transformation into a great writer, but in a sense catalysts are small things in
their own right. They simply precipitate a chemical reaction for which all the
ingredients are already present. If Jane Eyre was just a sort of Cinderella tale
it might have become a bestseller, but what makes it so passionately loved is
the character of Jane Eyre herself. For, as was much criticized at the time,
Jane Eyre was an absolute rebel. Although since the mid-nineteenth century
Jane Eyre has become a paradigm of the feisty female character, in fact she
broke the mould.
The dominant idea of Charlotte Brontë’s day was that women’s influence
depended on their being a sort of living repository of higher moral qualities.
That in itself led to what the philosopher John Stuart Mill in 1861 would
angrily call the ‘exaggerated self-abnegation which is the present artificial ideal
of feminine character’. As it would hurt Charlotte Brontë greatly to discover,
her brand of realism was found very alarming by the mid-nineteenth century
world, a world in which the harder women struggled to assert themselves, the
more their male relations struggled to suppress them. When we remember
the way that suffragettes were arrested just for marching for the vote less than
a hundred years ago, we must see Charlotte Brontë and her heroines as early
pronotypes for those women. Who knows whether the Pankhursts of Emily
Davison were not once thrilled by those wonderful words in Jane Eyre:
Nobody knows how many rebellions besides political rebellions fer-

ment in the masses of life which people earth. Women are supposed
to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need
exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as
their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute
a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded
in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to
confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings,
to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to
condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn
more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex.
As Charlotte would write to the editor at Smith, Elder and Co., Mr

Williams, when brickbats began to rain down with the bouquets on her and
her sisters’ heads, her whole life’s work had been about dismissing female
stereotypes. Whatever the criticisms of her work, she continued to hold that
‘conventionality is not morality’ and that ‘self-righteousness was not religion’,
and that furthermore she must have her own way in the matter of writing.
Even if she distressed men by confounding their ideas of women, she was
determined to continue to write as she felt was truthful. That impulse of
course found its greatest fulfillment in Villette, which was in many ways her
frankest and most autobiographical novel.
It would give Monsieur Heger and Brussels less than their due if one
did not admit their transforming effect on the mind of Charlotte Brontë.
For in a sense, one of the miracles of Brussels was that it injected a note of
down-to-earth reality into Charlotte’s writing. Two years before she left for
Brussels, Charlotte Brontë had made a formal renunciation of Angria. She
had recognized, as she put it, the need ‘to quit’ for a while that burning clime
where we have sojourned too long . . . the mind would cease from excitement
76 Rebecca Fraser
and turn now to a cooler region where the dawn breaks grey and sober’. It
took real life in Brussels to make her ready to almost completely forgo the
Byronic world. In The Professor, her first book written after Brussels, Charlotte
wrote, ‘I said to myself that my hero should work his way through life as I had
seen real living men work theirs — that he should never get a shilling he had
not earned — that no sudden turns should lift him in a moment to wealth
and high station’. For in Brussels, Charlotte at last found so many things to
stimulate and fascinate her, from unfamiliar customs to foreign religion, that
she finally seemed to have found the real world more intriguing than the
world below. Of course the charm of Jane Eyre, or should I more accurately
say the magic of Jane Eyre, depends to no small extent on the strange alchemy
which is half the workday world, half the greatest romance.
It is when we arrive at Villette we see that ten years after Brussels, once
again by the strange effect of what one can only call Charlotte Brontë’s genius,
the tiny stage of the Pensionnat Heger has become the backdrop to one of
the greatest nineteenth-century novels about the female condition. Jane Eyre,
like Wuthering Heights, will never be knocked off its place in the Pantheon of
great books. Nevertheless, if we divorce the plot of Jane Eyre from Charlotte
Brontë’s lyrical gifts, it may be faintly preposterous. But when we come to
Villette, there is nothing unbelievable about it. Villette is monumental, terrible
and, one feels, all too truthful an account of what life was like for so many
women one hundred and fifty years ago. As Tony Tanner wrote in his brilliant
introduction to the Penguin edition of Villette:
It is only in Villette that Charlotte Brontë found the most appro-

priate female narrator to explore in a sufficiently complex way the
tensions and alternations in her own inner and outer experience to
produce one of the great fictional studies, not of self-and-society,
but the self without society, in our literature.
And somehow, as Charlotte dwelt obsessively on Monsieur Heger, she began

to come to what echoes through Villette as almost abstract conclusions, about
the empty nature of life for women in the nineteenth-century world where
they are forced to conceal their true natures for the sake of male-imposed
propriety. That is the greatness of Villette: in language so strange and height-
ened that female misery has never been more poignantly conveyed, Charlotte
Brontë demonstrates the fate of women with any strong feelings that are not
what custom has pronounced appropriate for her sex. They are permanently
forced to keep their true nature hidden. Of course what is most interesting
about Villette is that, despite its misery, we emerge from the novel feeling that
Lucy Snow and Charlotte Brontë herself have triumphed. M. Paul Emmanuel
has not made the mistake that Dr Graham Bretton has made of judging Lucy
by her physique. He does not think of Lucy as ‘inoffensive as a shadow’. He

sees that there is a powerful fire within her. In the end, Lucy is finally able
to reveal her true nature to M. Paul, and he does not flinch away.
The most important thing about Villette is that Lucy finds someone to
whom she can ‘talk in her own way’, just as Lucy at last triumphs over the
spectre of the nun. As she says when she rushes at the nun on her bed and
realizes it is a dummy put there so that Ginevra Fanshawe may escape with
her suave lover, ‘all the movement was mine, so was all the life, the reality,
the substance, the force’. That is the effort of Charlotte herself, sitting on
those long afternoons at Haworth without brother or sisters: that is Charlotte
determined to never give in to outside opinion.
It was leaving England and getting away from her beloved home that
energized so much that was latent in Charlotte. We know that she detested
all kinds of religious zealots, but in Brussels she was brought up against
what she saw as an even more tyrannous way of life under the rule of the
Roman Catholic Church. We know that despite the restrictions of Yorkshire
life, Charlotte herself had a certain amount of freedom there, certainly at her
Haworth home and in the company of the Taylors. In Brussels, Charlotte was
amazed by the more conservative nature of Belgian society, where if we judge by
M. Paul’s behaviour, certain passages in literature were censored for not being
appropriate for delicately reared young women. In my view, the combination of
what appeared to Charlotte Brontë to be the tyranny of Roman Catholicism,
with its falseness, and its effect on what is required of women, made her want
to pick up her pen and pour out her anger, ten years after Brussels.
From a biographer’s point of view, what is fascinating about Villette is
the hold it suggests that, years later, Monsieur Heger retained over Charlotte
Brontë’s feelings. Just as we know that for a while George Smith exercised
a considerable hold over Charlotte Brontë’s all too impressionable heart, so
Graham Bretton wins Lucy’s — hence the slightly strange shape of Villette.
If not quite one of Henry James’ ‘baggy monsters’ — the writing is too
wonderful for that — it sometimes approaches it.
Charlotte Brontë was briefly dazzled by her newfound literary London
life with Mr. Smith, and the protective aegis of Mrs Smith, but when it
became clear that she and George Smith viewed one another very differently,
Charlotte reverted to the past. The Brettons begin the novel but then vanish
for many pages and it becomes clear to a biographer that Monsieur Heger is
stealing back into Charlotte Brontë’s heart, just as M. Paul Emmanuel steals
back into Lucy Snowe’s. By that time, she had a real friend of the bosom in
the shape of Mrs Gaskell, to whom she could confide and whose charming
daughters helped inspire the portrait of Pauline de Basompierre. But judging
by the evidence in Villette, Charlotte Brontë began to return obsessively to
the figure with whom she believed she had a sort of natural affinity, who she
felt had truly understood her.
78 Rebecca Fraser
The greatness of Villette is that it is more than just an acutely observed

Bildungrosman set in Belgium, and this is why I believe we must think of
Monsieur Heger mainly as a catalyst. Without Monsieur Heger there would
certainly have been no Villette. There would have been no Pensionnat des
Demoiselles; there would be no Madame Beck. Furthermore, Mr Rochester,
arguably the prototype of all post-1847 Romantic heroes, might have taken
a very different form. It is as a portrait of what it means to be a nineteenth-
century woman, however, and the pain that existing in the cage entails, and
the great language that Charlotte Brontë summons up from the depth of her
unhappiness, that makes it endure. And that is the product of Yorkshire, and
of long days alone. As Charlotte wrote to Mrs Smith, who asked her to come
and stay in January 1852, ‘the solitude of my life I have certainly felt very
keenly this winter — but everyone has his own burden to bear — and where
there is no available remedy, it is right to be patient and trust that Providence
will in His own good time lighten the load’.
In recompense for the lack of activity, in memory Charlotte saw action.
She returned to the bustle of the school in Brussels, and recreated it in the
minutest detail, overlaid by the heightened atmosphere of her pain. Lucy
Snowe still has some of Charlotte’s fire buried in her, remnants perhaps of Jane
Eyre’s rebelliousness, but it is banked down beneath misery and hopelessness
and an ominously grim religion. As one reviewer would write, ‘her talk is of
duty — her predilections lie with passion’. And it is from Yorkshire winters
and her observation of the wild weather effects that comes the weather in
Belgium, which I doubt is ever as dramatic as that described by Charlotte
Brontë’s pen. For in Charlotte Brontë’s extraordinary hands, even the weather
becomes apocalyptic. She wrote to Mrs Gaskell in November 1851 that
for a month or six weeks about the equinox (autumnal and vernal)
is a period of the year, which, I have noticed, strangely tries me.
Sometimes the strain falls on the mental, sometimes on the physical
part of me: I am ill with neuralgic headache, or I am ground to the
dust with deep dejection of spirits . . . That weary time has, I think
and trust, got over for this year. It was the anniversary of my poor
brother’s death, and of my sister’s failing health: I need say no more.
It seems to me that one of the truths about Charlotte Brontë was

that her strange upbringing, the hold that the infernal world had upon her
imagination, however much resented, and the tragedy of her life, meant that
any subject approached by her would be transformed into something more
striking than they were. Thus a little school in most vivid places in literature.
Charlotte Brontë’s gift needed something to feed on. By getting herself to
Brussels, she found the provender from which emerged two of the greatest
novels in the English language.
J ames R ea N ey
The Brontës: Gothic Transgressor as Cattle Drover
Article reprinted from Gothic Fictions: Prohibition, Trangression, edited

by Kenneth W. Graham (New York; AMS Press, 1989), pages 227–244, with
kind permission of the author and publishers.
N ot that long ago, I had the chance, in Ontario, Texas, and Yorkshire,
to spend some months slowly working my way through the greater part
of the Brontë juvenilia. This, for the most part, means the youthful writ-
ings of Charlotte and Branwell, some of it published, some of it still in
their microscopic hand printing, microscopic because the original readers
consisted of their own toy soldiers and dolls, the original inspirers of what
grew into a huge saga of interconnecting stories, prose fragments, and
poems which Charlotte and Branwell were still dreaming about when long
past their majorities. Mercifully, a great portion of this eye-challenging
manuscript labyrinth has been transcribed by W. C. Hatfield, the editor of
Emily Brontë’s poems. His priceless typescripts are available at the Brontë
Parsonage Museum, Haworth, Yorkshire, and to simplify reference in a field
where Branwell manuscripts are still an editorial nightmare, I have made
full use of them in this essay.
I had started this project with several possible aims in view: find the
sources of Wuthering Heights, explain the archangel imagery in Shirley, have a
try at establishing a Brontë canon, or even write a much needed book in defence
Brontë Studies, Volume 29, Number 1 (March 2004): pp. 27–35. © 2004 The Brontë
Society.
79
80 James Reaney
of Branwell against critics who dismiss him as a ‘second-rate Manfred’. One

small, simple question did keep nagging me, though, and eventually seemed
to be important enough to need in immediate answer. Why do both Branwell
and Charlotte make one of their shared Gothic heroes a cattle drover? As
late as 1840, Charlotte (Mr. Ashworth & Son — an incomplete romance)
has the Percy Northangerland figure go bankrupt, then disappear, a wicked
Byronic nobleman up until this point, and next bob up again in Yorkshire as
a cattle drover with a good credit rating even if questionably earned. Branwell
and Charlotte’s Northangerland must be one of the very few Gothic heroes
to hold down a job, although Branwell’s descriptions of his hero’s herding
journeys always manage to suggest some son of secret mythical edge beyond
the world of actual cowjobbing. As preparation for some sort of answer, the
first thing to clear out of the way is — what is Branwell and Charlotte’s
youthful epic basically about, and how is it told? Part of the reason for the
insouciance with which they make a nobleman twice as Byronic as Byron
chase cows is related to absurdist-nihilist attitudes these young writers have
with regard to any notion of a connection between a reality-principle and
story-telling. Here is a necessarily simplified and brief outline.
Twelve toy soldiers which his father gave to Branwell on his tenth
birthday in 1826 become Twelve Adventurers who, towards the end of
the eighteenth century, fictionally leave England to found a colony on the
west coast of Africa, a colony known as the Glasstown Confederacy ruled
by the Duke of Wellington with the foundation of Angria a later reaction
to constant rebellion by Quashia, the son of the previous black ruler of the
land imperialized by the Twelve. In Percy Northangerland, the black rebels
have a friend inside the Confederacy who either supports their outbreaks
or, in the name of Democracy, constantly rebels on his own against both the
Duke and his son, Charlotte’s favorite, Arthur Zamorna. Branwell called his
favorite toy soldier Buonaparte; Charlotte called her favorite, after Branwell
had given her permission to play with it, Wellington. What then seems to
happen, and this with many windings and turnings as more than ten years
of story-development goes by, is that the Buonaparte soldier becomes Percy
Northangerland — atheist, rebel, demagogue, sadistic trouble maker, and
the Wellington soldier becomes Charlotte’s Zamorna — constitutionalist,
younger, and more humane than the satanic Percy Northangerland to whom,
nevertheless, he retrains profoundly attached in a curious love-hate relationship.
Connecting the radical electrode with the constitutionalist one, many, many
feminine figures intertwine themselves about this pair of demons. There is,
for example, Lady Zenobia Ellrington who loves Zamorna, but marries Percy
Northangerland: in reply, Zamorna marries Percy’s daughter Mary. Over and
over again, Percy rebels, is exiled, returns, is forgiven; eventually he goes too
far. He has a young son of Zamorna’s mutilated and murdered, but, mind you,
this is in retaliation for Zamorna’s causing his daughter’s death by suddenly

deserting her. Of course, Zamorna did that to stop Percy from continuing his
attempts to take over the kingdom of Angria.
As Charlotte and Branwell edge into their twenties, the saga begins
to exhaust itself, or rather look around for some adult, plausible clothing.
Charlotte’s Angrian novelettes start showing signs of realism. The Professor,
with secret feet in Angria, is on its way. Branwell’s And the Weary Are at Rest
(1845) has the magic drover and many of other strange Angrian people,
but all toned down. Everyone knows that Percy should be hanged except
that Zamorna feels he will probably suffer more if he is not put out of his
misery. After 1845, Branwell begins to tell friends that he is Northangerland.
Not for nothing did the Brontë children call their literary world ‘the world
below’. If Branwell died thinking that he was the Byronic demon he had
developed out of a toy soldier, we do indeed receive a disturbing vision of
Percy Northangerland as Erlkönig, monster reaching out of the microscopic
manuscripts and pulling his boyish creator down into the hell of exhausted
introversion that had for a long time tormented him.
The above attempt to sum up the thousands and thousands of words in a
complex saga jointly dreamed up by two Genii (more of this soon) obviously
must slice through some labyrinthine intricacies in order to provide the
amount of scaffolding we need for examination of the Drover motif. Perhaps
two more comments should be made.
First, since the children took the initial situation of writing for and
about toy soldiers so very literally, they stumbled upon a literary fact which
many readers and writers would never have thought of and that is this: from
the toy soldiers’ viewpoint, from the literary characters’ outlook inside the
story, the Brontë children must seem inexplicable and terrifying giants who
exercise equally frightening powers over their hapless playthings. In this, the
literary creator is like the Genii in The Arabian Nights. Therefore, Charlotte
and Branwell called themselves and their sisters the four Genii, and so do
those of their literary creations as live a sufficiently long life to think about the
metaphysics of what is happening to them. To illustrate this, here is Charlotte
in an early tale called The Foundling in which Wellington’s son Zamorna has
died, but is suddenly revived:
They informed him that that morning, as they were walking in

the grove of trees, a terrific peal of thunder had burst directly over
their heads. On looking up they perceived the four chief Genii,
who rule the destinies of our world, appearing through an open-
ing in the sky. ‘Mortals,’ they cried, in a voice louder than the
previous thunder, ‘We, in our abundant mercy, have been moved
to compassion by oft repeated and grievous lamentations. The cold
82 James Reaney
corpse in the grave shall breathe again the breath of life, provided
you here lodge a solemn oath that neither he nor his relatives shall
ever take revenge on those who slew him, for it is the mighty
Branii’s will to revivify both the murderers also’. ‘We swear’, said
they without hesitation, ‘that none shall injure one hair of their
perjured heads’. No sooner were these words uttered than the
Genii vanished amidst the roar of ten thousand thunders.1
How absolute is the power the young storytellers have over their
characters, particularly if Branwell is in a good mood! The result of the Genii
or ‘unconcealed author’ convention is that the stories in the juvenilia have a
rather strange floating feeling. Anything can happen, and usually does. Much
stranger things happen than even an aristocrat turning into a cowherd, and
they often do so with a sort of odd probability.
Secondly, since the original choice was Charlotte/Wellington as good
versus Branwell/Napoleon as bad, no matter how Byronized and Satanized
both characters became the stories always work for a reader’s sympathy with
Zamorna and fascinated terror at Percy; consequently, Zamorna never gets
to be drover. Somewhere along the line it must have been drummed into the
Brontë children’s heads that drovers made mistakes. How does that humble
profession fit in with all this?
So far as I can see, this figure makes: its first appearance in one of
Branwell’s Letters from an Englishman (1831):
For a long time the Marquis of Douro and myself continued gazing
on the scene silently, forgetting in our excess of admiration that we
were in a chariot, or were any other than stone, till we were startled
out of our reveries by the noise and bellowing of an immense
drove of mountain cattle which were going toward the city, the
road which was a noble width being one hundred yards across was
choked up with them to the distance of a quarter of a mile . . .
The Marquis explains to the Englishman, Branwell’s persona here, that

the drover of this immense herd is none other than Pigtail ‘that celebrated
champion of Frenchmen’ who turns out to be ‘nearly 9 feet high, lean, bony
and ill built, yet bearing the marks of extreme strength’. Enquiries as to
where the cattle come from meet with the reply that they are stolen; Charles
Wellesley, the Marquis of Douro’s twin brother and a favorite persona of
Charlotte’s, also adds:
Yes and once I saw this Pigtail sell to my Father some of our own
cattle and my Father, knowing they were his, did not say anything
but paid him a penny apiece for them — knowing that he would
be quite content with that sum and thus he recovered the beasts at
3 pence while had he gone to law or arrested the brute he would
have had to pay 30 or 40 [pounds] . . . 2
Where would the Brontë children have got hold of the idea of an evil cattle
drover? My feelings are that this is the result of stories about his Irish past
told them by their father, Patrick Brontë. After all, there are Irish traditions
about his grandfather having been a big cattle drover. Still, how I arrived
at this hypothesis needs some more preparation. In the voluminous and
dreamlike flow of the juvenilia, Pigtail soon fades, regrettably, from view,
and two other characters, more Branwell’s specializations than Charlotte’s,
take over Pigtail’s cattle driving and other more sadistic responsibilities (he
loves torturing children). These are Robert King, also known as S’death,
and his master, the aforementioned Alexander Percy Northangerland,
known in earlier stories as Rogue. The former, S’death, is steward, valet,
assistant drover, and groom to the latter.
Early descriptions of S’death appear in The Coronation of Adrian
Augustus Wellesley, First King of Angria (1834): ‘a little scrappy old chief, in
a long brown coat and drovers boots, with a hat such as tops many a potato
field, who bestrode his gaunt grey nag,”3 and in A New Year’s Story (1836):
‘unknown and unregarded as a Yorkshire drover well might be’.4 Nearly
always drunk, known, and deservedly so, as a jackal and a hoary bloodhound,
this remarkable figure drives both cattle and human beings for both the
Percys, the father, old Edward Percy, a wicked Northumbrian nobleman, and
his son, Rogue (later known as Percy Northangerland), who is born in Africa
after S’death persuades the father to leave England for greener pastures in
the Glasstown Confederacy. On their way to Africa through Ireland, S’death
kills the Duke of Mornington for his master: with the plunder thereby
gained, old Edward Percy buys a sizeable estate in Senegambia. Some years
later, when Alexander Percy Northangerland desperately desires to get hold
of his avaricious old father’s money, S’death obligingly polishes him off.
Since his victims are often much larger than himself, and he is described as
being so old and decrepit, the reader is not surprised to learn that Robert
King or S’death has very special powers — he Is really a disguised version of
his author, Branwell Brontë! Yes, S’death’s deadly activities turn out to be a
parody of the omnipotent author who, at any time he chooses, can kill off as
many of his own creations as he chooses.
The twelfth letter of Letters from an Englishman, 1832, shows this concept
of story management in an embryonic state; there, a certain Highlander, the
Ape of the Hills, has a vision of ‘a little old man with a red head’ who tells him
to meet him at the seashore: ‘when he reached the seaside in Northumberland,
84 James Reaney
he saw coming toward the shore a copper cauldron with the little old man
in it whom he had seen in his dream’. In the copper cauldron, they both
sail to Africa where the Highlander joins in helping Percy Northangerland
in yet another uprising: ‘This old man was the Genius Branni!’.5 Later, by
having S’death as a much more disguised ‘Branwell’, this young author will
considerably improve on this earlier and more cumbersome method of
showing the author guiding, with visions and magic cauldrons, the plot of a
story. In 1833, the whole idea is given another twist in The Pirate; by this time,
the ‘little red old man’ has become a dwarfish S’death.
Percy Northangerland is the pirate, and a very successful one. The
only trouble is that after the execution of his victims, his valet, S’death, with
disgusting sadism, insists on re-stabbing each and every corpse. Having had
enough, Percy and the narrator (the very Englishman who earlier on met
with the giant Pigtail) gang up on the old ruffian and try to kill him, that is,
kill the very person who is writing them:
The old dwarf was striving to strike his knife into Rogue’s [Per-
cy’s] heart. Rogue was grappling with him. They were both on the
floor. In my hurry I seized a poker, and, running up, dashed it at
the head of S’death. This stunned him. Rogue then snatching up a
pistol from the table clapped it to his head and fired. The skull was
blown to pieces and the brains scattered round the room. Rogue
without speaking motioned me to take hold of his feet, and, him-
self seizing his shoulders, we proceeded silently up the steps to the
deck. Here Rogue crying: “I have done with thee, thou wretch,”
took the ugly heap of mortality and hurled it into the sea.
But, it is not as easy for characters to be without an author as they may have
imagined:
When it touched the water a bright flash of fire darted from it,
changed it into a vast GENIUS of immeasurable and indefinable
height and size, and, seizing hold of a huge cloud with his hand,
he vaulted into it, crying: “And I’ve done with thee, thou fool!” and
disappeared among the passing vapours. Ere he departed three vast
flashes of fire came bursting round. They were the Chief Genii,
Talli, Emii, and Anni. He that ere this was the little hideous old
man was the chief genius, and BRANNI. I stood petrified with
fear and astonishment.6
Although Charlotte (Chief Genius Talli) can provide a few, this must be the
most mind-boggling moment in all of the youthful writings, even more so
when the reader remembers that it is written by a fifteen year old, and that
it antedates not only Monty Python, Tony Hancock, and the Goon Show,
but also Borges, Nabokov, and the nouvelle vague.
At this point in my reading of the juvenilia, I used to wonder why on top
of all this S’death also had to be a drover: I thought of how drovers drive their
cattle to market after which their beasts will be slaughtered; how this is what
happens to quite a few of Branwell’s Characters, his merciful revival of the
dead Zamorna being, after all, in a tale written by his sister, Charlotte, S’death,
then, is Branwell’s supreme drover herding both cattle and dramatis personae
this way and that, his tyranny only interrupted Charlotte’s rescue attempts
in her parallel stories. Probably, there is something to this use of the drover
image, for one of the distinctive feelings about the Glasstown and Angria
sagas is their constant movement through time and space as their creators’
lively minds impel their creations now through the southern savannahs of the
Glasstown Confederacy, now through the moorlands on Angria’s northern
borders. The other solution I have hinted at took some time to develop, partly
because I kept missing the reference to it in a story by Charlotte.
S’death’s most notable kill, the death of Maria, Percy’s wife, leads to
a break in Percy Northangerland’s character on the other side of which he
himself becomes a drover. It happens thusly. Having borne him two sons,
Edward and William, Maria Percy is about to present him with another child.
With pre-Freudian undertones, Percy suddenly orders S’death to kill the boys
because, since they are males, they do not resemble their mother sufficiently.
S’death does disappear with the boys, but neglects to tell anybody that he
has hidden them alive from their father’s wrath ready for use later on by
Charlotte in The Professor. After bearing a girl baby, Maria dies of grief — for
her two sons who she feels have probably been murdered. In an ecstasy of grief
and guilt, Percy again turns pirate. After a spell of this, so we learn from A
New Year’s Story, he orders his vessel home under S’death captaincy, and lands
alone on the coast of Sidon, there to wander back to Senegambia appearing
‘on a sudden at Percy Hall before his mother and his child, after an absence of
six dark and bloody years’. And, at this point he too becomes a drover:
First, Percy knew that he was such an one as, if seen, could not
be unnoticed; so he determined upon being seen — but by whom?
The Aristocracy could not be moved: they had no complaint. The
Democracy could, for they were bold and reckless; so he laid out
thousands of his gory gains in enormous stocks and set up an
immense concern in horses and horned cattle. Travelling through
different kingdoms of the Union, attending all the great Fairs, and
carrying along with him his lieutenant, Old S’death, and a desper-
ate, dissolute company of partners, the dregs of the Western Aris-
86 James Reaney
tocracy, his companions of the Rover, and men lost to kindred,

country, and religion in riotous debauchery. With such a SOUL,
Percy of course became King and Emperor among all the Drov-
ers, Cow-jobbers, Cattle-dealers, pasturers and farmers of Africa.
They could not tell what to make of him, but they worshipped him
and wondered at him.
Among the thousands who attended the great fairs at Fidena,
Denard, and Selden, in Sneachisland or Pequena, Rossendale,
Freetown, and other such marts in the east and south, he was
monarch in the market place and hotel, made speeches, instilled
corrupt and revolutionary ideas, increased and confirmed adher-
ents, and in four years time became an object of alarm and suspi-
cion to the scarcely awakened Government.7
As the Western Drover, Percy’s specialty is the downfall of ancient houses,

rather as Heathcliff ’s is the destruction of both the families of Thrushcross
Grange and Wuthering Heights. In the Coronation of Adrian Augustus
Wellesley, a Colonel Hartford tells such a story to a Branwellian persona
called Richton. Happening to pass the ruins of Hartford House as they
proceed to the ceremonies at Adrianopolis, the new capital of Angria, the
colonel remembers that when Percy’s cattle came up the road they raised
such a cloud of dust that a tramp thought ‘it was the bottomless pit opening
all its smoke before him’. Inviting this demon to stay as a house guest, Sir
Edward Hartford soon finds himself entangled:
He [Northangerland] pretended to affect a mighty regard for the

baronet, and soon entered into some deep gambling with him I
can tell you, by which atrocious piece of acting he brought the
baronet in a fortnight’s time head over heels into difficulties; then
he humbugged him into some intricate juggle in cattle-dealing,
affected to put him again into fair water, gave him a note of hand
to an unlimited time, laughed at the thoughts of Sir Edward pay-
ing him his due, and swore he should directly be worth twice the
sum of what he owed him. Now, Sir Edward had a son, young
squire, friend of mine. Rogue had infatuated him I think, for he
almost talked of going as one of Rogue’s riders, only the arch-fiend
one night so swore and sneered him down that I think it cured
him of the thought. Hartford had a daughter too, the Honourable
Miss Amelia Hartford. She was then nineteen . . .8
The upshot is that Sir Edward loses all his property to Percy who seduces
his daughter. The son he murdered in a neighbouring wood.
Through with Hartford Hall, Percy, leaving his steward Steaton (S’death?)
to receive rents, next attacks a farmhouse on the northern moors known
as Darkwall. The manuscript, written in 1837, is untitled and begins: ‘The
season had advanced into the last week of November before the wheels of my
travelling carriage once more rattled over their native pavements’, continuing
with a conventional Branwell persona telling of a visit with the Thurstons
of Darkwall whose family had once been lords of a nearby manor. Readers
of Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre may note such details as ‘a plantation of
gloomy firs, one clump of which the oldest and the highest stretched their
horizontal arms above one gable like the genii of that desolate scene’, and the
fact that the property is haunted by a Gytrash:
The Darkwall Gytrash was known by the form of an old dwarf-

ish and hideous man, as often seen without a head as with one,
and moving, at dark, along the naked fields which spread round
the aged house. Its visits were connected in all men’s minds with
the fortunes of the family he hovered round, and evil omens were
always drawn on such occasion, and, if tradition spoke true, ful-
filled upon them.9
The situation calls for an appearance of this ominous phantom since the
narrator finds Mrs Thurston anxiously waiting for the return of her husband
from Fidena while having to entertain his friend, Percy Northangerland.
The Western Drover, with all his cattle and entourage, has come on ahead
of his host for possibly a longer stay than the Thurstons had anticipated.
The story is unfinished, but what seems to have happened is that Percy has
murdered Mr Thurston and, as he once did at Hartford Hall, is about to lay
siege to Darkwall with property and woman as prime objectives:
While his gang was present he had appeared sour and impetuous,
they were now gone; and while his hostess occupied a sofa by the
fire he arose on a sudden and commenced a progress backwards
and forwards through the room. His majestic figure, now light-
ened, now shadowed, as he advanced to or receded from the fire,
and his blue, wayward eyes enkindled and his expression each
moment changing, while he poured forth on many a subject, his
words so warmly and flowing eloquent.10
Perhaps this passage, more than any other in the juvenilia, sums up how
powerful the drover/aristo coupling can be. One moment the hero’s a dusty
figure on the road, the next he’s a glamorous, drawing room charismatic.
Just how much this effect could be carried intact from ‘the world below’
88 James Reaney
of the Angrian saga into ‘the world above’ of a plausible, realistic novel set
in contemporary England was the next aesthetic problem Branwell and
Charlotte faced.
If And the Weary Are at Rest is a fragment from a novel Branwell was
working on in 1845 and not an Angrian story, then he seems to have been able
to do without the drover effect as a means of anchoring Northangerland; the
only hint of it appears in S’death being called a ‘groom’. Charlotte, however, in
her uncompleted Mr Ashworth and Son, 1840, allows Percy Northangerland his
droverhood, and I rather wonder if it would not appear in the early chapters
she evidently excised from the final version of The Professor, the professor being,
after all, a son of Percy in a secret, Angrian past. ‘Ashworth’ is an alias for Percy
both she and Branwell had used five years earlier, and, in this unfinished attempt
to turn her Angrian material into some sort of Richardsonian romance, not
only does Percy Northangerland as drover appear, but this time Liverpool is
mentioned is a destination for has trading vetures: ‘many mercantile men, too,
are yet living in Leeds and Manchester and Liverpool who can remember the
market dinners given by Ashworth’. Ashworth-Percy works with four helpers
who are said to have been chosen ‘for his associates in his great triple character
of demagogue, cow-jobber, and horse-jockey. Their names are: Gordon ‘a
penniless scoundrel’, Daniels ‘who knew well how to disguise a traitor’s heart
under the features of a jovial Irish gentleman’, McShane, an Irishman with ‘the
advantage of a Gallic education’ and Robert King, ‘his hair very red’.11 If the
question ‘why drover?’ can be answered, then I think that ‘Liverpool’ and ‘Irish
gentleman’ may also fall into place.
The above question can be answered by the earlier mentioned hypothesis
that the drover motif belongs to stories their father told them about his own
Irish past and that of some of his ancestors in County Down and elsewhere.
This sounds like quite a leap to take, but hypotheses, which is all this at present
can be, must take wide enough leaps to let in enough material for the inevitable
sorting, rejecting, and possible accepting to come when, long overdue, Branwell’s
youthful writings have, at last, all been edited and published.* Having taken
the leap, the next question is from whom did Patrick Brontë (originally Brunty
until he made an inspired upward mobility change) hear them from his father,
Hugh Brunty, and this now leads us to a much reviled book published in 1893,
The Brontës in Ireland by the Rev. W. D. Wright, D.D.
Untidy as Dr. Wright’s chronology may be, and really wild as some of
his conclusions are, nevertheless, he did hear and record some remarkable
oral traditions with regard to the Brunty family in Ireland, and it may very
well be that it is exactly the wildness of such stories that may have attracted
the attention of young genii not particularly interested in getting the facts
straight about Wellington and Napoleon either, but eager for any material
that would keep a story going. And one such Irish story about their family was
that one of their uncles named Walsh or Welsh was named after a demonic
foundling who was brought into the family by their great grandfather who
was himself a drover down near Drogheda. The foundling grew up to take
over his benefactor’s business by devious means.
The great grandfather ‘used to live on a farm on the banks of the Boyne,
somewhere above Drogheda. Besides being a farmer he was a cattle-dealer,
and he often crossed from Drogheda to Liverpool to dispose of his cattle’.
On the way back, the story goes, a foundling discovered in the hold of the
ship was rescued by the cattle drover and his wife and taken home with them
where it was not beloved by its foster sisters and brothers. Called ‘Welsh’, he
was favorite of the cattle driving Brunty who:
. . . took him to fairs and markets, instead of his own sons, as soon
as he was able to go, and he found him of the greatest service. His
very insignificance added to his usefulness. He would mingle with
the people from whom Brontë wished to purchase cattle, find out
from their conversation among themselves the lowest price they
would be willing to take, and report to his master. Brontë would
then go to the dealers, and without the usual weary process of
bargaining offer them straight off a little less than he knew they
wanted, and secure the cattle.
In no time at all, Welsh takes over the old cattle drover’s business;
They were returning from Liverpool after selling the largest drove
of cattle that had ever crossed the Channel, when suddenly Brontë
died on board. Welsh, who was with him at the time of his death,
professed to know nothing of the master’s money, and as all books
and accounts had been made away with, no one could tell what had
become of the cash received for the cattle.12
Not long after this, Welsh had taken over the Brunty farm and married one
of his late master’s daughters. Childless, the couple adopt a nephew, Hugh
Brunty, so much mistreated that he runs away at the age of fifteen. Yet
survives to prosper in County Down, marry, father a large family, the first
born of which is known to us as Patrick Brontë with, among other brothers
and sisters, a brother known as Welsh or Walsh, presumably named after
the demonic foundling.
Here, then, is a possible answer to why a drover, keeps reappearing in the
Glasstown and Angrian tales. There may be other explanations, and they are
welcome, but at least this one also explains something that has always puzzled
me. Using the persona of Lord Charles Albert Florian Wellesley, Charlotte
90 James Reaney
writes My Angria and the Angrians (1834) and meets on his/her travels in
Angria her brother Branwell whom she calls Patrick Benjamin Wiggins. She
asks him what relations he has and he replies:
Why, in a way I may be said to have no relations. I can’t tell who

my father and mother were no more than that stone. I’ve some
people who call themselves akin to me in the shape of three girls
not that they are honoured by possessing me as a brother, but I
deny that they be my sisters. Robert Patrick S’DEATH Esqre is
partly my uncle, but he’s the only relative I’ll acknowledge.13
For ‘partly my uncle’ then, read ‘my uncle named after a foster great-uncle’
who did some rather inspiring things so far as literary children in search of
material were to be concerned: for example, stow away on a boat sailing out of
Liverpool to Ireland where he behaved in peasant terms to his benefactors the
way Percy Northangerland behaves in aristocratic Gothic terms. Some years
later, like S’Death, he even writes old Mr Brunty out of the script. There is
no reason why Gothic romance material should always be gentlemanly and
upper class; just as Branwell and Charlotte showed the way in other Angrian
stories where factory life is involved, they also showed how invigorating a
drover could be when cross-hybridized with the more usual titled neurotic.
No t e s
* Since this article was first written, the prose works of Branwell have been
published as The Works of Patrick Branwell Brontë: an Edition. Edited by Victor A.
Neofeldt, 3 vols. Garland Publishing, N. Y. and London, 1997-2000.
1. Charlotte Brontë, The Foundling in The Miscellaneous and Unpublished
Writings of Charlotte and Patrick Branwell Brontë (The Shakespeare Head Brontë)
henceforth cited as SHCBM. ed. by T. J. Wise and J. A. Synsington (Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1936), p. 288.
2. Branwell Brontë, SHCBM, i. pp. 104–107.
3. Branwell Brontë, No. 41, ti, TS, p. 33. This and all other typescripts cited
are in the Hatfield transcripts of Juvenilia, Brontë Parsonage Museum.
4. As above, p. 181.
5. Branwell Brontë, SHCBM, i. pp. 148.
6. As above, p. 181.
7. Branwell Brontë, No. 42, iii, TS, p. 121–123.
8. As above, No. 41, ii, TS, p. 38–40.
9. As above, No. 65, iii, TS, p. 382.
10. As above, p. 370.
11. Charlotte Brontë, No. 65, TS, pp. 32–35.
12. William Wright, The Brontës in Ireland, or Facts Stranger Than Fiction
(New York: D. Appleton, 1893), p. 190.
13. Charlotte Brontë, SHCBM, ii, pp. 9–10.
M eghan B ullock
Abuse, Silence, and Solitude in Anne Brontë’s

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is a much overlooked and impor-
tant text in terms of early feminist writing. Its themes of marital abuse and
women’s silence, separation from society, and solitude are all explored in depth.
This article considers the themes of silence in the face of abuse and the solitude
it causes. It focuses on the relationship between Helen and Milicent, examin-
ing the lack of communication between them and the connection between their
silence and the cycle of abuse within families and within society.
If there were less of this delicate concealment of facts—this whispering

‘Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace, there would be less of sin and
misery to the young of both sexes who are left to writing their bitter
knowledge from experience.1
T he Tenant of Wildfell Hall is an unusual text, both shockingly modern and

graphic for its time, and still relevant today in Anne Brontë’s treatment of
the questions of women’s silence and how the ‘delicate concealment of facts’
only leads to more trouble, both for the women concealing their plight from
each other, and for the other women who see and follow their example.
Anne says in her preface to the second edition that the reason for her
writing this novel is to ‘tell the truth’.2 She has decided to speak for those
women who can’t, who, like Helen, Milicent, and Aunt Maxwell, suffer at the
Bronte Studies, Volume 29, Number 2 (July 2004): pp. 135–141. © The Brontë Society
2001.
91
92 Meghan Bullock
hands of others and are unable for one reason or another to make themselves
heard. In exploring the story of Helen Huntingdon, Anne is able to give her
readers a look into the lives of different women and their relationships, their
motivations, and the abuses they suffer. As readers, we can surmise that there
is much going on in the lives of these women that is not explicitly stated. Even
though we have access to Helen’s diary, we are not privy to everything that is
going on in her marriage, especially with the added insulation of reading her
diary through Gilbert’s eyes, and Anne does not give any hints about whether
or not the diary was edited because of its being used as the text of a letter. This
insulation is one way in which Anne herself silences Helen in the text, and is
also only one example of Helen being silenced. Whether the silencing is her
own doing or that of others is a question that pervades the text.
Those who have grown up surrounded by abused women and who
have been victims of abuse themselves generally learn from mothers and
grandmothers how to deal with it; they either learn to he silent, or, because
their mothers have made that mistake, they learn the necessity of seeking
support from other women, and this breaks their silence. Helen’s diary begins
with her aunt, the mother figure in the novel, giving her warnings about
marriage. She is full of advice but strangely reticent on the subject of her
own treatment by her husband. The subject of marriage is introduced because
Aunt Maxwell noticed Helen’s attraction to Arthur and was uneasy about it.
She says
‘Now I want to warn you, Helen, of these things, and to exhort

you to be watchful and circumspect from the very commencement
of your career, and not to suffer your heart to be stolen from you by
the first foolish or unprincipled person who covets the possession of
it [. . .] I may as well tell you likewise — for if I don’t others will —
that you have a fair share of beauty, besides — and I hope you may
never have cause to regret it!’ (p. 148)
Helen, of course, trusts in her own strength and clear perception of people to
guide her in her choice of husband. Anne never shows that she has experience
of her own or others to warn her otherwise. Helen admits to being ‘vexed at her
incredulity; but I am not sure her doubts were entirely without sagacity; I fear I
have found it much easier to remember her advice than to profit by it — indeed,
I have sometimes been led to question the soundness of her doctrines on those
subjects’ (p. 151). She does not take her aunt’s advice, or even take her warn-
ings to heart, but she does ask her aunt if this is the voice of experience. When
Helen asks if she has ‘been troubled in that way’ (p. 149) Aunt Maxwell replies
‘No, Helen [. . .] but I know many that have; and some, through carelessness,
have been the wretched victims of deceit; and some, through weakness, have
Abuse, Silence, and Solitude in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall 93
fallen into snares and temptations terrible to relate’ (p. 149). Anne has made
Helen’s uncle a selfish reprobate, and this is what prompts Helen’s curiosity
about her aunt’s experience. Her uncle keeps friends similar to Arthur’s, and
shows the signs of having lived like him at one time in his life. Helen’s aunt
serves as Helen’s model for how to deal with marital troubles: silence.
When Helen is first introduced as the widow Graham, the reader is
struck by her solitude. In her diary, no friends are mentioned prior to her first
season in London, which is where she meets Milicent. There is no friendship
in the text with the ladies she is shown to be on good terms with at Wildfell
Hall, and the relations with most ladies in the neighborhood seem barely
cordial. Milicent Hargrave is the only woman in the novel that Helen is shown
to have any kind of close or open relationship with. This could be a reason
why she is silent — she has no one to talk to except for Milicent, and Milicent
is so innocent at first that she would have no way to sympathize with Helen
in her troubles, and thus arguably be of no help to her whatsoever.
When she first meets Milicent, Helen describes her as ‘gentle’ and says that
‘she had taken a violent fancy to me, mistaking me for something vastly better
than I was’ (p. 160). She refers to her as ‘poor Milicent’. Milicent appears in the
subsequent chapter as Helen’s intimate friend as well as a houseguest, invited by
Helen’s aunt to benefit Helen by her example of ‘gentle deportment, and lowly
and tractable spirit’ (p. 169). Milicent is praised by many of the characters in the
book for what they deem her humble spirit, hut that same gentleness is what
causes her to be a victim of her husband for so long. In this novel, Milicent is
shown to he a ‘sweet, good girl’ (p. 169), but ironically, the things that would
make her seem so to a Victorian audience are the very things that Anne, Helen,
and later Milicent’s husband Hattersley see as faults in her character.
Anne devotes the remainder of chapter 18, as well as chapter 19, to
Helen’s descriptions of what has passed between her and Arthur, who is
beginning to show himself as he really is. Even though Helen has her ‘intimate
friend’ (p. 170) Milicent in her house, she does not speak to Milicent about
her uneasiness over Arthur but chooses to write about it instead, saying,
This paper will serve instead of a confidential friend into whose

ear I might pour forth the overflowing of my heart. It will not
sympathize with my distresses, but then it will not laugh at them,
and, if I keep it close, it cannot tell again; so it is, perhaps, the best
friend I could have for the purpose. (pp. 169–170)
It seems strange that Helen would not talk to Milicent instead. If she really
is such a gentle, good, kind person, she would not laugh at what Helen had
to say, she would sympathize with her, and keep her own counsel. It seems
as though Milicent has all the qualities Helen attributes to a piece of paper.
94 Meghan Bullock
Of course, a pragmatic reason for Helen’s silence is that if Helen had spoken
these things to her friend, there would be no diary to use as a device for the
novel. Nevertheless, even had Anne not told the story through Helen’s diary
(through Gilbert and then Halford), it is arguable that she still would not
have had Helen tell Milicent her troubles.
Anne introduces shame into Helen’s life: she begins to feel ashamed
of Arthur and her attraction to him, and does not want to reveal either his
conduct or the depth of her attachment to him. After all, he does have ‘the
audacity to put his arm around my neck and kiss me’ (p 173), he flirts with
Annabella, and he violates Helen’s privacy. Arthur’s general conduct is not
calculated to gain approval, and it would be especially offensive to someone
like Milicent, who is pure and gentle. To open herself up to Milicent would
be to risk being looked down upon for her taste in men, or to be lectured at,
or some other unpleasant consequence. However, as the story progresses and
the characters unfold, the reader learns that Milicent would indeed be a good
confidant, but Helen does not realize this soon enough, and does not take
advantage of it when she can.
Milicent is as guilty of not speaking out about her husband’s treatment
of her as Helen is, but she is at least honest in her reaction to Helen when
the letter tells her of impending marriage to Arthur. Milicent is no more
support than Helen’s aunt, much to Helen’s displeasure; she say that ‘she rather
provoked me by her manner of taking it’ (p. 195). Milicent’s reaction to Helen’s
announcement of her engagement was, ‘Well, Helen, I suppose I ought to
congratulate you [. . .] but I did not think you would take him, and I can’t help
feeling surprised that you should like him so much’ (p. 195). She continues
to try and bring things about to Arthur to Helen’s attention that may prove
to be problematic later on, perhaps to make her think of these things while
there is still a way out. It is ironic, however, that she didn’t volunteer any of this
before matters reached this point. Helen silences her friend, though, by simply
ignoring her. Though not done on purpose, it takes the power from Milicent’s
speech all the same, and she never levels with Helen like this again. Helen
silences her Aunt in the same way and is herself a victim of silencing through
being ignored — her protestations being ignored by Hargrave and Gilbert, her
ideas being ignored by the society surrounding Wildfell Hall, and so on. Anne’s
women, even those who do speak, are consistently ignored. By having Helen
ignore Milicent’s observations and intended advice, Anne makes her forfeit
some valuable insights as well as the opportunity to develop a deeper friendship
with Milicent. This is not uncommon in either women’s literature or real life.
By ignoring everybody’s advice and observations concerning Arthur,
Helen gets herself into a brutal, unhappy marriage. It is ironic that Anne
uses Helen, a woman, and one who is strongly in favor of independent
womanhood, as a silencer of other women who have chosen to say things that
are on their minds; things that could be dangerous. The question is, though,
would Helen have listened to advice more intently, and not silenced her aunt,
if she had shared more of her personal experiences with Helen? For example,
if Helen had known that her aunt was speaking about marriage to a man
like Arthur from an intensely personal experience, would she have given her
more credit and heeded her hard-earned wisdom? Perhaps, if she had shared
her own experience rather than just good advice, Helen’s aunt could have
helped to break the cycle of abuse and silence sooner. However, because Anne
was writing this piece as a representation of real life, this would have been
impossible as, arguably, it happened so rarely in Victorian society.
After the first few weeks of marriage, Helen makes the observation that
‘Arthur is not what I thought him at first’ (p. 215) and realizes, ‘I might have
known him, for everyone was willing enough to tell me about him [. . .] but
I was willfully blind’ (p. 215). This would seem to be a turning point, Anne
giving her a realization about not ignoring the things others have to say, and
perhaps it is, but from this point on in the novel, Helen (like many women in
Anne’s audience) internalizes her pain and struggles even more than before,
to the point of not writing it all out in her diary. There are points where
she is obviously leaving out details, or perhaps entire (important) exchanges
between Arthur and herself. Helen, like Anne’s contemporaries, is either lying
to herself, or does not want there to be any chance that her darkest secrets
be discovered. Women lacking the support and benefit of the past experience
of other women are more liable to fall into this trap of either excusing their
husbands’ bad treatment or else hiding it out of shame. If the women in
Helen’s family, and those surrounding her, had been more open about their
own sufferings, Helen probably would not have settled for justifying Arthur’s
actions; but that is not the story that Anne wanted to tell.
Discovering Arthur’s past intrigues so angers Helen that she locks
herself into her bedroom and admits to her diary, ‘for the first time in my
life, and I hope the last, I wished I had not married him’ (p. 222). This is their
first real argument, at the end of which she tries to convince him that she
never would have married him if she had known these things that the other
characters would have told her. He responds:
Do you know that if I believed you now, I should be very angry? —

but thank Heaven I don’t. Though you stand there with your white
face and flashing eyes, looking at me like a very tigress, I know the
heart within you, perhaps a trifle better than you know it yourself.
(pp. 222–223)
In spite of Helen’s words and actions, Arthur does not listen to or believe
her, so she writes a letter to her aunt; ‘of course telling her nothing of all this’
96 Meghan Bullock
(p. 223); the legacy of silence continues. This letter is not the only example
Anne gives of Helen’s desire to reach out to her family. During Arthur’s first
absence, she would ‘beg my uncle and aunt, or my brother, to come and see
me, but I do not like to complain of my loneliness to them’ (p. 233). Anne
continues relating her and her family in this fashion: even though Helen
realizes that her aunt knows that something is amiss, she keeps it a secret
until she finally leaves Arthur. She writes letters to all of those close to her
telling them what she has done, but her aunt is the only one she gives a
reason to. She says of writing this last letter, ‘[it was] a much more difficult
and painful undertaking [. . .] but I must give her some explanation of that
extraordinary step I had taken [. . .] At last, however, I told her I was sensible
of my error’ (p. 391). This is as close as she comes in the text to opening up
to her aunt. She apparently does not tell her much more than she has to, and
yet says that ‘if they knew all, I was sure they would not blame me’ (p. 391).
If she told them everything she thought they needed to know in order to
pardon her fully, she would not need to have worries about their reception
of her and the step she had taken. Anne uses this to reinforce the legacy of
silences that Aunt Maxwell left Helen.
Helen’s aunt passed silence on to Helen, and so it is natural that Anne
would have Helen pass it on to Milicent. Since Helen is the only other woman
Milicent knows in an obviously less-than-happy marriage, and since Helen
is possibly Milicent’s only real friend, Milicent takes all her cues on how to
deal with things from her. The letter that Milicent writes to Helen to tell her
of her engagement to Hattersley is the most open communication the two
women ever have about their troubles with their men. Of her impending
marriage, Milicent says,
To tell you the truth, Helen, I don’t like the thought of it at all. If
I am to be Mr. Hattersley’s wife, I must try to love him; and I do
try with all my might: but I have made very little progress yet [. . .]
he frightens me with his abrupt manners and strange hectoring
ways, and I dread the thought of marrying him. ‘Then why have
you accepted him?’ you will ask; and I didn’t know I had accepted
him; but mamma tells me I have, and he seems to think so too. I
certainly didn’t mean to do so; but I did not like to give him a flat
refusal for fear mamma should be grieved and angry [. . .] mama
is so delighted with the idea of the match; she thinks she has
managed so well for me [. . .] I do object sometimes and tell her
what I feel, but you don’t know how she talks [. . .] Do you think
it nonsense, Helen? [. . .] Do write to me, and say all you can to
encourage me. Do not attempt to dissuade me, for my fate is fixed
[. . .] and don’t say a word against Mr. Hattersley, for I want to
think well of him [. . .] After all, I think he is quite as good as Mr.

Huntingdon, if not better; and yet you love him, and seem to be
happy and contented. (pp. 234–235)
Helen responds in her journal saying, ‘Alas! Poor Milicent, what encourage-
ment can I give you? — or what advice — except that it is better to make a
bold stand now, though at the expense of disappointing and angering both
mother and brother, and lover, than to devote your whole life, hereafter,
to misery and vain regret?’ (pp. 235–236). Anne does not say how Helen
responded to Milicent, and one can only assume based on the rest of the
text that this advice was not given. Milicent’s letter is a plea to Helen, to
somehow help her out of the mess she is in. Helen is in no position to help
her friend as, in the text, she ignored all the advice given her, and that is
part of the reason for her resigned tone upon reading the epistle. She has
already given Milicent a model to follow, that of seeming ‘to be happy
and contented’ even when she suffers tremendously. Whether implicitly or
explicitly, Milicent picks up on this, and never opens herself up again the
way she does in this section of the novel. Her later letters provoke Helen’s
distrust based on her own self-deception and deception of others. Chapter
25 ends with this description of Milicent’s letters:
She either is or pretends to be quite reconciled to her lot. She

professes to have discovered numberless virtues and perfections
in her husband, some of which, I fear, less partial eyes would fail
to distinguish, though they sought them carefully with tears; and
now that she is accustomed to his loud voice and abrupt, uncourte-
ous manners, she affirms she finds no difficulty in loving him as a
wife should do, and begs I will burn that letter wherein she spoke
so unadvisedly against him. So I trust that she may yet be happy;
but if she is, it will be entirely the reward of her own goodness of
heart; for had she chosen to consider herself the victim of fate, or
of her mother’s worldly wisdom, she might have been thoroughly
miserable [. . .]. (pp. 239–240)
Helen is unable to believe that Milicent is truly happy because she knows
too well the methods that women use to deal with terrible situations. Like
Helen, Milicent is silent, but she is better at self-deception than Helen is.
Anne gives her a gentler temperament, so Milicent is able to make herself
feel that she is happy and content, unlike Helen, who feels her sorrows keen-
ly though she hides them. Helen is perceptive enough to see that Hattersley
makes ‘life a curse’ (p, 269) to her friend, and ‘as for her own misery, I rather
feel it than see it expressed in her letters’ (p. 270).
98 Meghan Bullock
The women in the novel do the best they can to avoid admitting the
truth to themselves or others. When Arthur accuses Helen and Milicent of
abusing their husbands in correspondence, Helen offers a possible, though
partial, explanation for their silence: ‘We are both of us far too deeply ashamed
of the errors and vices of our other halves, to make them the common subject
of our correspondence. Friends as we are, we would willingly keep your
failings to ourselves — even from ourselves if we could’ (pp. 270–271). Later,
Anne offers further explanation for Helen’s silence when Helen recounts a
visit with her aunt, who she fears is more perceptive than she would have
liked. She muses
Was it pride that made me extremely anxious to appear satis-

fied with my lot, — or merely a just determination to bear my
self-imposed burden alone, and preserve my best friend from the
slightest participation in those sorrows from which she had striven
to save me? It might have been something of each, but I am sure
the latter motive was more predominant. (p. 276)
Shame or wounded pride, and the reluctance to draw her closest friends into
her pain are the recurring excuses that are given for Helen’s silence. She
seems to feel guilty when she thinks of sharing her burdens with others;
Anne was faulted for these unpleasant portrayals of Helen’s burdens, because
they were far too ‘coarse and brutal’ (according to the Spectator, 8 July 1848).
With such reception to the fictionalized stories of women’s suffering, one
can only wonder if there would be any difference in the reception of the fully
authentic, fully detailed stories of what women really went through in their
own homes. False guilt for marrying Arthur may have been the main motive
Anne gave Helen for silence, but surely she knew that women are silent also
because their stories were usually not received.
It is gratifying that Helen does not end the novel in silence. As previously
mentioned, the story of her life with Arthur was told through her diary,
which was couched in the narrative of Gilbert Markham.3 In order for him
to have been able to share what she has written of her story with the readers
of the novel (or his friend Halford, as the novel is presented as a letter to
him), Gilbert would first have had to have read her diary. In order for this
to happen, she would have had to have given him her diary to read. When
she does this, it is an act of resistance against the people starting rumors
against her, as well as resistance against Gilbert and his weakness in believing
them. This is the point where Anne finally allows Helen to break her silence
— after finding herself so strongly drawn to Gilbert, and realizing that only
the truth, her own story, would clear her of whatever shame the countryside
was attempting to bring down on her. She makes the first move to confront
Gilbert about his sudden change in demeanor toward her, and when he is
reluctant to listen to her reasoning, confronts him again, protesting, ‘I would
have told you all!’ (p. 141) when he suggests that he has, from eavesdropping
on her conversation with Lawrence, learned more than she would ever have
let him know. Later on, when Gilbert comes to hear the explanation, which
she has decided him unworthy of, he explains to her why he feels that the
gossip of the countryside is believable. Her response to this, which is the
vocalized tuning point in her struggle against silence, is: ‘You should have
come to me after all [. . .] and heard what I had to say in my own justification.
It was wrong to withdraw so secretly and suddenly, immediately after such
ardent protestations of attachment, without ever assigning a reason for the
change. You should have told me all — no matter how bitterly — it would
have been better than this silence’ (p. 145, italics mine).
Anne allows Helen to physically liberate herself when she runs away
from Arthur; she is able to resist him physically all along, but it is not until
she can bring herself to share her experiences with Gilbert that she is able to
begin transformation. The cultural transformation that her experiences make
her responsible for can only be brought about through her sharing with other
women, building solidarity, and encouraging others to do the same. This stage
of her development is not shown in the text; rather, Anne takes it upon herself
to provide the avenue for abused women to speak through.
R ef er e nce s
1. Anne Brontë, Preface to the Second Edition of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall,
1848.
2. Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (Viking Penguin, 1980), p. 29.
3. In ‘The Voicing of Feminine Desire in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall ’, Eliza-
beth Langland points out that this female narrative nested inside an ostensibly male’s
story was considered a ‘correct’ form of presentation of women’s stories in Victorian
times; ironically, in order to get her heroine heard, Brontë had to silence her in the
context of the writing of the novel, by not giving her anything to say firsthand.
P aul E dmondson
Shakespeare and the Brontës
W hen Virginia Woolf was invited to lecture at Cambridge in 1928, she

famously remarked that ‘a woman must have money and a room of her own,
if she is to write fiction’. Her papers were later published as a short book, A
Room of One’s Own, in which she frames her thoughts like this:
But, you may say, we asked you to speak about women and fic-
tion—what has that got to do with a room of one’s own? I will try
to explain. When you asked me to speak about women and fiction
I sat down on the banks of the river and began to wonder what the
words meant. They might mean simply a few remarks about Fanny
Burney; a few more about Jane Austen; a tribute to the Brontës
and a sketch of Haworth Parsonage under snow, some witticisms
about Miss Mitford, a respectful allusion to George Eliot; a refer-
ence to Mrs. Gaskell and one would have done.1
A tribute to the Brontës and a sketch of Haworth Parsonage covered in

snow. Already we have an image of quaintness, an image of isolation, an
image of an entire family, which included both male and female writ-
ers, deserving of our tribute. But, you may think, this is an article about
Shakespeare and the Brontës, what has that got to do with a room of one’s
Brontë Studies, Volume 29 (November 2004): pp. 185–198. © The Brontë Society 2001.
101
102 Paul Edmondson
own, or Virginia Woolf? I will try to explain. A Room of One’s Own pro-
poses more than the necessity of financial independence for women who
write; it proposes the necessity of an imaginative space, and the Brontë
sisters certainly had that in abundance, if not the complete privacy of their
own rooms. In her work, Woolf also proposes an evolutionary community
of women writers, a creative sisterhood whose transcendental influence
makes it possible for women to write, for ordinary women to write and
struggle for independence. For most of their lives, a varied experience of
the world and extensive travel was denied the Brontë sisters, Woolf reminds
us, and their novels:
were written by women without more experience of life than

could enter the house of a respectable clergyman; written too
in the common sitting-room of that respectable house and by
women so poor that they could not afford to buy more than a few
quires of paper at a time upon which to write Wuthering Heights
and Jane Eyre. 2
Now you and I know, as did Virginia Woolf, that the Brontës did travel
from Haworth, but her exaggeration here serves her over-arching hypoth-
esis. Imagining their struggle against social restrictions, Woolf muses how
much more impossible it would have been ‘for any woman to have written
the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare’. And so Woolf imagines
that Shakespeare:
had a wonderfully gifted sister, called Judith [. . .]. She was as

adventurous, as imaginative, as agog to see the world as he was.
But she was not sent to school. She had no chance of learning
grammar and logic, let alone reading Horace and Virgil. She
picked up a book now and then, one of her brother’s perhaps, and
read a few pages. [. . .] Perhaps she scribbled some pages up in an
apple loft on the sly, but was careful to hide them or set fire to
them. [Then, one day, escaping the prospect of an awful marriage
she . . .] made up a small parcel of belongings, let herself down by
a rope one summer’s night and took the road to London. She was
not seventeen. The birds that sang in the hedge were not more
musical than she was. She had the quickest fancy, a gift like her
brother’s for the tune of words. Like him she had a taste for the
theatre. She stood at the stage door; she wanted to act, she said [. . .]
at last Nick Greene, the actor-manager took pity on her; she found
herself with child by that gentleman and so—who shall measure
the heat and violence of the poet’s heart when caught and tangled
in a woman’s body?—killed herself one winter’s night and lies

buried at some cross-roads where the omnibuses now stop outside
the Elephant and Castle. 3
Shakespeare’s imaginary sister ‘never wrote a word’, Woolf reminds us

towards the end of her essay, but ‘she lives; for great poets do not die; they
are continuing presences; they need only the opportunity to walk among
us in the flesh’.4 And so we arrive at Haworth Parsonage buried in snow to
pay tribute to the Brontës: Charlotte, Emily, and Anne; who, in Virginia
Woolf ’s view, are sisters of Shakespeare who could and did write, and whose
words were published and started to become famous during their tragically
short lives. Importantly for us, Woolf refers to the Brontës several times dur-
ing the course of A Room of One’s Own, and speculates that:
when one reads of a witch being ducked [. . .] a wise woman

selling herbs [. . .] then [. . .] we are on the track of a lost novel-
ist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen,
some Emily Brontë who dashed her brains out on to the moor or
mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture
that her gift put her to.5
It is significant, I think, that here, Emily Brontë is directly associated with

Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth who says that she would have ‘dashed the
brains out’ of her innocent child, rather than be in any way uncertain about
her vow to kill King Duncan, as Macbeth is (Macbeth, I. 7. 58).6 ‘Mopped
and mowed’ is also an allusion to King Lear, and Edgar as Poor Tom’s
‘Flibbertigibbet, of mopping and mowing, who since possesses chamber-
maids and waiting-women’ (King Lear, IV. I. 64). In his Arden edition, Reg
Foakes suggests this may mean: ‘making faces and grimacing (as cham-
bermaids do behind the back of their mistress?)’.7 Although only a passing
reference, Woolf ’s remarks about Emily Brontë are deeply revealing in their
characterization of her as darkly neurotic—conjuring up immediately a
woman, like Lady Macbeth, given to fits of madness and sleepwalking—and
possessing a deeply disturbing, violent imagination. One only has to recall
Virginia Woolf ’s own unhappiness, madness, and her suicide to realize that
here she is also writing about herself. Interestingly, too, she associates Emily
explicitly with tragedy: Macbeth, a Scottish play set in a not dissimilar land-
scape to that of Emily’s own beloved Haworth. The reference to King Lear
perhaps evokes something of the immense frustration that Woolf perceives
in Emily’s character, as viewed through her work. For Woolf, the Brontës
are the most Shakespearian of all of Shakespeare’s imaginary sisters, and
Emily the most Shakespearian of all.
104 Paul Edmondson
The size of the Brontë sisters’ output is too large for me to consider very
much of it in the course of a single article. So, after sketching an impression
of the Shakespeare that the Brontës might have known, I am going to turn to
Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights to draw out
some of their Shakespearian parallels, and to discuss the kind of importance
they attach to Shakespeare.
Although it includes the Life of Sir Walter Scott., the Lord Wharton
Bible, and Milton’s Paradise Lost, no edition of Shakespeare is listed in the
inventory of ‘Books belonging to or inscribed by members of the Brontë
family and held in the Brontë Parsonage Museum’. This should not be too
surprising. The inventory is small and the most commonly read books tend
not to survive, being so well-thumbed that they fall to pieces. Remarkably,
though, Anne’s copy of Shakespeare does survive in the Folger Shakespeare
Library, Washington, D.C., and is signed by its owner (The Dramatic Works,
London: I. J. Chidley, 1843, 4 vols). Jane Austen conducts a discussion
between Henry Crawford and Edmund Bertram in that Titanic-on-still-
waters of a novel, Mansfield Park (chapter thirty-four). The heroine Fanny
Price overhears Henry Crawford reading Shakespeare’s Henry VIII to
Lady Bertram and taking all the parts himself with an excellent variety
of voices. Edmund remarks that the play must be a favourite of Henry’s,
who replies:
‘It will be my favourite I believe from this hour [. . .] but I do not

think that I have had a volume of Shakespeare in my hand, since
I was fifteen.—I once saw Henry the eighth acted.—or I have
heard of it from somebody who did—I am not certain which. But
Shakespeare one gets acquainted with without knowing how. It is
part of an Englishman’s constitution. His thoughts and beauties
are so spread abroad that one touches them everywhere, one is
intimate with him by instinct—No man of any brain can open at
a good part of one of his plays, without falling into the flow of his
meaning immediately.’
‘No doubt one is familiar with Shakespeare in a degree,’ said
Edmund, ‘from one’s earliest years. His celebrated passages are
quoted by every body; they are in half the books we open, and
we all talk Shakespeare, use his similes, and describe with his
descriptions.8
It is probably safe to assume that the all-pervasive influence of Shakespeare

as outlined in this extract was the same for the Brontës as it was for Henry
Crawford, Edmund Bertram and, one supposes, Jane Austen herself. In
her biographical novel, Dark Quartet: The Story of the Brontës, Lynne Reid
Banks sketches what the reading climate of the young Brontës might have
been like:
When he [the Reverend Patrick] saw Branwell in a reverie over

some book, written in a more permissive age, Patrick wondered
if he was wise in allowing his children access to any volume in
his library or that at Ponden Hall, which they frequently visited
to borrow books. At first he had felt that they were safe from
the grosser allusions in Shakespeare, for instance, by virtue of an
inability of their essentially innocent minds to understand. Now
he was no longer sure.9
Perhaps the Reverend Patrick might have made sure that his children were
kept safe from Shakespeare’s sexier passages by acquiring the relatively
recent four-volume edition of twenty plays in The Family Shakespeare, edited
by Henrietta Bowdler (1754–1830), which cut all the so-called ‘grosser
allusions’? Or he may have steered his children towards the ten-volume,
completely Bowdlerized edition of 1818 (the same year in which Emily was
born, and still less than 200 years after the publication of the First Folio),
by Henrietta’s twin brother, Thomas? A translation of August Wilhelm
Schlegel’s Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature was published in 1815;
William Hazlitt’s Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays appeared in 1817 and
his theatrical criticism, A View of the English Stage, appeared in 1818. It is
likely that these classics among Shakespearian criticism were relished by
the Brontë family. Their favourite novelist, Sir Walter Scott, was himself
profoundly influenced by Shakespeare, and the Brontës probably enjoyed
noticing the imaginative and prolific connections with Shakespeare that
stream through Scott’s fiction.
The Brontës might have read with interest, too, Anna Jameson’s
Characterisations of Women, Moral, Poetical and Historical of 1832. Later
this became known as Shakespeare’s Women and is a character study of the
leading roles. The Brontës might have been aware of the great Shakespearian
actor Edmund Kean’s (1787–1833) flashes of lightning across the London
stage. Charlotte herself saw William Charles Macready’s (1793–1873)
Shakespearian performances as Macbeth and Othello at the Theatre Royal,
Covent Garden. To her friend Margaret Wooler she confessed to finding
his style of acting ‘false and artificial’. John Forster (who Charlotte met in
December 1849) vibrantly reviewed Macready’s productions of King Lear and
Coriolanus in February and March 1838 for The Examiner. Macready helped to
restore King Lear to something closer to Shakespeare’s version, post-Nahum
Tate, by re-instating the role of the Fool. Helena Faucit was a similar age
to the Brontë sisters, just twenty, when she appeared as Hermione opposite
106 Paul Edmondson
Macready’s Leontes in The Winter’s Tale in 1837; the year the Age of Victoria
began, when the Queen herself was only a young woman of eighteen. Writing
to her dear friend, Ellen Nussey, at around this time, Charlotte Brontë very
usefully provides an inventory of her own, a recommended reading list:
You ask me to recommend some books for your perusal; I will do

so in as few words as I can [she writes on 4 July 1834]. If you like
poetry let it be first rate, Milton, Shakespeare, [ James] Thomson,
Goldsmith, Pope (if you will, though I don’t admire him) Scott,
Byron, [Thomas] Camp[b]ell, Wordsworth and Southey. Now
Ellen don’t be startled at the names of Shakespeare, and Byron.
Both these were great Men and their works are like themselves. You
will know how to chuse the good and avoid the evil, the finest pas-
sages are always the purest, the bad are invariably revolting you will
never wish to read them over twice, Omit the Comedies of Shake-
speare and the Don Juan, perhaps the Cain of Byron though the
latter is a magnificent Poem and read the rest fearlessly, that must
indeed be a depraved mind which can gather evil from Henry the
8th from Richard 3 from Macbeth and Hamlet and Julius Caesar.10
What is so interesting about this extract from Charlotte’s letter is that although
Shakespeare is recommended at the same time as several other writers, it is
Shakespeare whom Charlotte seems most keen to impress upon Ellen. After men-
tioning Shakespeare once, then Byron, Charlotte comes back to Shakespeare,
perhaps implying that the ‘bad invariably revolting’ passages are to be found
mainly in Shakespeare’s comedies. One wonders, too, if there is a criticism of
the Bowdlerized editions lurking at the back of ‘you will know how to chuse
the good and avoid the evil [. . .] that must be a depraved mind indeed which
can gather evil from Henry the 8th from Richard 3 from Macbeth and Hamlet
and Julius Caesar’. Notice, too, how Ellen is to omit Shakespeare’s comedies
altogether. This does not mean that Charlotte herself did not like them, only
that they are not part of her selective reading list. Perhaps she thought that in
themselves the comedies would not lead to the intellectual improvement that
Ellen was apparently seeking. Charlotte also makes explicit mention of Henry
VIII, the play so admired by Henry Crawford in Mansfield Park, with all his
associations of Shakespeare being part of an English constitution.
In Charlotte Brontë’s novel Shirley, it is Coriolanus, the role so well
portrayed by Macready, that becomes the all-important play. The critic
Marianne Novy, who is primarily interested in the way women novelists engage
with Shakespeare’s plays in order to express their own political and emotional
concerns, believes that ‘three images of Shakespeare have particular resonance
for women’s history: the outsider, the artist of wide-ranging identification
and the actor’.11 The Brontës were natural outsiders in the margins of their
social sphere, not least precociously and geographically. The Shakespeare
that the Brontës inherited from the Romantic writers—Keats, Hazlitt, and
Coleridge—was understood to be predominantly a poet of Nature and one
who engaged with the whole of creation on equal terms. For the Romantics,
Shakespeare did not judge others on moral or political grounds and seemed
to avoid expressing an opinion about any one of the characters, or moral
standpoints, in his plays. Shakespeare seemed to be the ultimately sympathetic
artist, and it is this that Charlotte is exploring in Shirley.
On the whole, the Brontës never seem to think through Shakespeare in
any of their writing, in the way that Walter Scott and, later, Charles Dickens
did; rather, Shakespeare is made present as an implied influence throughout
their work, and at odd intervals. Chapter six of Shirley is called ‘Coriolanus’ and
provides the most overt example of what Shakespeare meant to the Brontës
as far as their fiction was concerned. In Shakespeare and the Victorians, Adrian
Poole notices that Coriolanus was an important play for Victorian novelists:
Dickens names a character Lady Volumnia Dedlock in Bleak House (1852–
1853) and George Eliot’s Felix Holt (1866) includes several references to the
play.12 Here Charlotte presents a heroine who does think through Shakespeare.
During 1811–1812, at the time of the Luddite rebellions, Caroline Helstone
tries to persuade her distant cousin the mill owner, Robert Moore, to be kinder
to his workers. Robert is described as being not even half-English and the fact
that he comes from Belgium and speaks French to his sister, Hortense, makes
him an outsider from the community in which he is the chief industrialist. For
their evening entertainment, Caroline suggests to Robert that they read:
‘[. . .] an old English book, one that you like; and I will choose a
part of it that is toned quite in harmony with something in you. It
shall waken your nature, fill your mind with music: it shall pass
like a skilful hand over your heart, and make its strings sound.
Your heart is a lyre, Robert; but the lot of your life has not been
a minstrel to sweep it, and it is often silent. Let glorious William
come near and touch it; you will see he will draw the English
power and melody out of its chords.’
‘I must read Shakespeare?’
‘You must have his spirit before you; you must hear his voice
with your mind’s ear; you must take some of his soul into yours.’
‘With a view to making me better; is it to operate like a
sermon?’
‘It is to stir you; to give you new sensations. It is to make you
feel your life strongly; not only your virtues, but your vicious, per-
verse points.’13
108 Paul Edmondson
One wonders how much of Charlotte Brontë there is in the voice of Caroline at
this point. Shakespeare makes one feel life more strongly and draws a distinctly
English power out of a person’s heart. And so Robert and Caroline settle down to
read Coriolanus. There is a strain of Paulina and Leontes in this extract. Towards
the end of The Winter’s Tale, Paulina tells the King of Sicilia, ‘It is required |
You do awake your faith’ (V. 3. 94), here Caroline says that Shakespeare ‘shall
waken [Robert’s] nature’. Similarly, just as Julius Caesar mistrusts the rational
Cassius because ‘he hears no music’ (Julius Caesar I. 2. 203), so too Caroline sug-
gests that Robert needs more music in his intellectual and emotional outlook.
Shakespeare, she hopes, will ‘fill [Robert’s], mind with music: it shall pass like a
skilful hand over [his] heart, and make its strings sound’.
The very first scene in ‘Coriolanus’ came with smart relish to his
intellectual palate, and still as he read he warmed. He delivered
the haughty speech of Caius Marcius to the starving citizens
with unction; he did not say he thought his irrational pride right,
but he seemed to feel it so. Caroline looked up at him with a
singular smile.
‘There’s a vicious point hit already,’ she said; ‘you sympathise
with that proud patrician who does not sympathise with his fam-
ished fellow-men, and insults them.’14
As they continue to read, Charlotte Brontë tells us that Robert ‘did not read
the comic scenes well, and Caroline, taking the book out of his hand, read
these parts for him’.15 Perhaps there is here an answer to Charlotte telling
Ellen Nussey to omit the comedies of Shakespeare from her course of read-
ing. Ellen, like Robert, might not have read the comedy well enough on her
own and might have lost her taste for Shakespeare. How many school chil-
dren, one wonders, have suffered a similar fate when, looking at a so-called
Shakespearian comedy, they have not found anything in it to make them
laugh? At the end of their reading, Caroline asks Robert:
‘Now, have you felt Shakespeare?’[. . .]

‘I think so.’
‘And have you felt anything in Coriolanus like you?’
‘Perhaps I have.’
‘Was he not faulty as well as great?’16
Caroline goes on:
‘[ . . . ] you must not be proud to your work-people; you must

not neglect chances of soothing them, and you must not be of
an inflexible nature, uttering a request as austerely as if it were a

command.’
‘That is the moral you tack to the play. What puts such notions
into your head?’
‘A wish for your good, a care for your safety, dear Robert, and
a fear caused by many things which I have heard lately, that you
will come to harm.’17
Perhaps Charlotte Brontë chose Coriolanus because of its military aspects.

Her novel is set at the time of Napoleon, and she herself had great admira-
tion for the Duke of Wellington, whom she called ‘le moderne Coriolan’.18
One thinks of the Reverend Patrick Brontë’s account to Elizabeth Gaskell
for her biography of Charlotte:
When mere children, as soon as they could read and write, Char-
lotte and her brother and sisters used to invent and act little plays
of their own, in which the Duke of Wellington, my daughter
Charlotte’s hero, was sure to come off conqueror; when a dispute
would not infrequently arise amongst them regarding the com-
parative merits of him, Buonaparte, Hannibal and Caesar. When
the argument was warm, and rose to its height, as their mother was
then dead, I had sometimes to come in as arbitrator, and settle the
dispute according to the best of my judgment.19
Of all of Shakespeare’s plays, Coriolanus, like Julius Caesar, shows the power
of a crowd most effectively. In Caroline Helstone’s reading, this becomes
synonymous with the disenfranchised working class in Robert Moore’s
mill: ‘I cannot help thinking it unjust to include all poor working people
under the general and insulting name of “the mob” and continually to think
of them and treat them haughtily.’20 The word ‘mob’ does not occur any-
where in Shakespeare, but is used here in relation to the dramatic crowd in
Coriolanus. John Forster’s review of the 1838 production, which has already
been mentioned, explains how Macready’s Coriolanus was the first to use a
sizeable on-stage crowd. Forster, too, uses the word ‘mob’:
The mob in Coriolanus were now for the first time shown upon the
stage, on a level with the witches in Macbeth, as agents of the tragic
catastrophe. [. . . Here] was not the one, or two, or half-dozen
inefficient sawnies [simpletons, fools] of former times, when John
[Philip] Kemble stalked and thinvoiced it among them, like the
ghost of the Roman State; but a proper massy crowd of dangerous
violent fellows, fit to hustle Macready’s flesh and blood. 21
110 Paul Edmondson
In this context, the ‘mob’ which Caroline Helstone perceives in Coriolanus

might in fact be influenced by Charlotte’s own knowledge of the play in
performance from twenty-seven years later than the period in which Shirley
is set. Margaret J. Arnold, in an essay about Shakespeare’s play in relation to
Shirley, notices how Robert Moore, through the influence of both Caroline
Helstone and Shirley Keeldar, ‘achieves a more comprehensive manhood’.22
In short, he is a Coriolanus who is tamed, unlike St. John Rivers in Jane
Eyre, another Coriolanus figure, who remains ‘true to his lonely integrity but
[is] difficult to domesticate’. Marianne Novy observes simply that Charlotte
uses Coriolanus in Shirley ‘to give women more power’. 23
I now want to consider how Emily Brontë interweaves and adapts
Shakespeare through Wuthering Heights, and how this adds to the power and
impact of her novel. There is a long tradition of comparing Emily Brontë to
Shakespeare. Two contemporary reviewers of Wuthering Heights seem to have
been the first to do so publicly. G. W. Peck, reviewing the novel for the American
Review in 1848, mentions that ‘in conversation we have heard it spoken of
by some as next in merit to Shakespeare for depth of insight and dramatic
power’.24 Sydney Dobell, assuming that Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell were one
and the same, praises Wuthering Heights for its psychological insights: ‘it has
been said of Shakespeare, that he drew cases which the physician might study;
Currer Bell has done no less [he means Ellis Bell, Emily not Charlotte, since
he’s writing about Wuthering Heights]’.25 Dobell’s comparison was endorsed by
Algernon Charles Swinburne in 1877. He goes on to notice the landscape:
which serves as overture to the last fierce rapturous passage of rag-

ing love and mad recrimination between Heathcliff and the dying
Catherine; the mention of the church-bell that in winter could
just be heard ringing across the naked little glen, but in summer
the sound was lost, muffled by the murmur of blowing foliage and
branches full of birds. 26
Swinburne compares this passage to Banquo noticing the ‘temple-haunting

martlet and its loved mansionry which serves as prelude to the entrance of
Lady Macbeth’.27 This time a moment in Emily’s work is being compared to
Lady Macbeth, rather than a comparison being made between Lady Macbeth
and Emily herself, as Virginia Woolf does. Swinburne’s comparison relates
very much to the tradition of comparing Wuthering Heights to Shakespearian
tragedy. Angus Mackay, writing about Emily for the Westminster Review in
1898, again anticipates to a later comparison by Virginia Woolf:
It is scarcely too much to say of Emily that she might have been
Shakespeare’s youngest sister. [. . .] what is there comparable to
this romance except the greater tragedies of Shakespeare? The

single peasant in the story, Joseph, is of the kin of Shakespeare’s
clowns, and yet is quite distinct from them [. . . Heathcliff]
reminds us of Shylock and Iago—not, indeed, by any likeness to
their characters, but by the sense of wonder he awakens in us at
the power that could create such a being. Catherine Earnshaw,
again, and Catherine Linton—are not these by their piquancy and
winsomeness almost worthy of a place in Shakespeare’s gallery of
fair women? The whole story has something of the pathos of King
Lear and much of the tragic force of Macbeth.28
In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf says that ‘Emily Brontë should
have written poetic plays’. 29 In 1949, an article by Melvin R. Watson sug-
gested that Heathcliff was neither like Macbeth nor like Iago, ‘but rather a
Hamlet without Hamlet’s fatal irresolution’.30 Watson goes on to impose an
unlikely five-act structure over the novel to complete his comparison with
Elizabethan drama. At the end of the 1970s, Sandra Gilbert and Susan
Gubar’s influential study, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer
and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, drew further comparisons
between Wuthering Heights and King Lear. In Gilbert and Gubar’s reading
Heathcliff is the bastard son of Nature (like Edmund), set against Edgar
Linton of Thrushcross Grange. Catherine Earnshaw plays the parts of
Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia ‘to the Lear of her father and her husband’. 31
When speaking at a service of remembrance for the one hundred and fiftieth
anniversary of Emily Brontë’s death, Inga-Stina Ewbank quoted the lines of
Catherine Earnshaw about Heathcliff:
He’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his
and mine are the same, and Linton’s is as different as moonbeam
from lightning, or frost from fire [. . .] My love for Heathcliff
resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible
delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff—he’s always, always
in my mind—not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a plea-
sure to myself—but as my own being.
Inga-Stina Ewbank comments that:
This double movement within the text—inwards as well as out-

wards, defining as well as suggesting—is typical of Wuthering
Heights. It corresponds to the quality this novel has—much like
that of a Shakespeare play—of existing on several levels at once:
being at one and the same time an exciting tale of Yorkshire life,
112 Paul Edmondson
set with great precision in place (the moors, the beck, the two
houses) and time and weather, and a metaphysical exploration of
identity and—indeed—of immortality. 32
Embracing all these comments and comparisons, I would like to offer some
more of my own, the better to appreciate how closely Emily Brontë relates
Wuthering Heights to the plays of Shakespeare.
There is, first and foremost, the distinctive structure of Wuthering Heights.
Like several of Shakespeare’s plays, it seems essential that there are two main
imaginative spaces: Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange. These two
homes are separated by the moors. The warm domesticity of the Grange is
contrasted to the wild austerity of the Heights. This contrast is as crucial to the
depiction of the novel’s characters as the Forest is in relation to the Court in As
You Like It or A Midsummer Night’s Dream; as crucial a contrast for the genres at
work within the novel as the cold and wintry Sicilia is to the warm and pastoral
Bohemia in The Winter’s Tale. Moreover, the generational change which makes
Wuthering Heights seem like two novels in one also bears strong comparison to
The Winter’s Tale. This would make Heathcliff the Leontes figure, nursing his
hurt and despondency over the years, until ‘a wide gap of Time’ (The Winter’s
Tale, V. 3. 155) itself brings in its revenges (in the words of Feste in Twelfth
Night, V. I. 373), and these events to their conclusion. This effect is heightened
by the narrator, Mr. Lockwood, going away from the village of Gimmerton
for almost a year, missing the final events leading up to Heathcliff ’s death, and
having to have them reported by Nelly Dean. This takes, by my reckoning, the
number of narratives in the novel up to sixteen; the number of years that Time
moves forward at the beginning of act four in The Winter’s Tale.
Shakespearian allusions are indeed plentiful in Wuthering Heights and
what follows now are just a few of them. Some of the contexts for love in
the novel, perhaps surprisingly, refer to Shakespearian comedy, rather than
tragedy. Emily seems to do this in order to show the failure of the comic
situation. So when Mr. Lockwood explains in chapter one how he made
himself unworthy of a ‘comfortable home, and only last summer’, he explains
how he met ‘a real goddess’ of a woman somewhere on the coast. ‘I “never
told my love” vocally; still, if looks have language, the merest idiot might have
guessed I was over head and ears [. . .] and what did I do? I confess it with
shame—shrunk icily into myself, like a snail, at every glance retired colder
and farther’.33 Here Lockwood quotes directly from Viola in Twelfth Night,
who tells Orsino of an imaginary half-sister who:
never told her love

But let concealment, like a worm i’th’bud,
Feed on her damask cheek. She pined in thought,
And with a green and yellow melancholy,

Sat like patience on a monument,
Smiling at grief. (Twelfth Night II. 4. 110)
There is, too, an allusion to Love’s Labour’s Lost, with Lockwood shrink-
ing into himself ‘like a snail’. The simile is common enough, but following
on immediately from the self-conscious reference to Twelfth Night, I think
Emily is reminded of the Lord Berowne in act four, scene three:
Love’s feeling is more soft and sensible

Than are the tender horns of cockled snails.
(Love’s Labour’s Lost, IV. 3. 314)
It is as if Lockwood, punished by denying the potential comedy in his life,

is displaced to the ‘misanthropist’s heaven’ of Wuthering Heights and has to
sit ‘like patience on a monument’ while Nelly Dean tells him stories of those
whom love has tortured and who have committed extreme acts of violence
because of it. Similarly, a twisted parallel is made to Much Ado About Nothing
In the great episode of chapter nine, Heathcliff, unlike Benedick, does not over-
hear how much Catherine loves him, but how much she loves Edgar Linton
instead, and how it would degrade her to marry himself. And, unlike Beatrice
in Much Ado, Catherine explains that ‘If I were in heaven, Nelly, I should
be extremely miserable.’ In Much Ado, Beatrice explains to Leonato how she
imagines herself leading apes into Hell, as an unmarried woman, but:
[. . .] there will the devil meet me, like an old cuckold, with horns
on his head, and say, ‘Get you to heaven, Beatrice, get you to
heaven; here’s no place for you maids:’ So deliver up I my apes,
and away to Saint Peter fore the heavens; he shows me where the
bachelors sit, and there live we as merry as the day is long. (Much
Ado About Nothing, II. 1. 38)
For Catherine Earnshaw, quite the reverse seems true. She has dreamt that
she was in heaven but it
did not seem to be my home; and I broke my heart with weeping to

come back to earth; and the angels were so angry that they flung
me out, into the middle of the heath on top of Wuthering Heights,
where I woke sobbing for joy. 34
There is even an inversion of The Taming of the Shrew towards the end of
the novel when Catherine Linton is being held prisoner by Heathcliff. She
114 Paul Edmondson
wants freedom and she is hungry, but unlike her namesake, Kate, she is
resolved not to eat: ‘I wouldn’t eat or drink here, if I were starving’. 35 So
allusions to Shakespearian comedies in Wuthering Heights serve to invert
any comic possibility and contribute instead toward the novel’s overriding
tragic outcome.
Adrian Poole notices King Lear and Macbeth in Wuthering Heights and
interestingly shows how Emily’s God-forsaken universe paves the way for
Thomas Hardy’s.36 But Poole does not mention Hamlet and Antony and
Cleopatra, which are also present. King Lear is mentioned explicitly in chapter
two. When Mr. Lockwood is attacked by two large dogs, Gnasher and Wolf,
on first arriving at Wuthering Heights, he curses them as he struggles: ‘I
ordered the miscreants to let me out—on their peril to keep me one minute
longer—with several incoherent threats of retaliation that, in their indefinite
depth of virulence, smacked of King Lear.’37 ‘Miscreant’ is the word that Lear
uses against Kent in the opening scene, and ‘incoherent threats’ seems to
refer to act two, scene two when he says to Goneril and Regan:
I will have such revenges on you both,

That all the world shall—I will do such things—
What they are, yet I know not, but they shall be
The terrors of the earth. (King Lear, II. 2. 453)
Mr. Lockwood’s allusion to King Lear provides an initial context for

Heathcliff ’s terrible revenges which emerge during the course of the novel.
Here Heathcliff laughs at the ‘copious bleeding at the nose’ that his dogs
have inflicted upon Lockwood. Later, Hindley, drunk and cursing, ‘vocif-
ering oaths dreadful to hear’, calls his son Hareton an ‘unnatural cub’, 38 a
curse Lear-like in its tone and comparable to ‘detested kite’ and ‘unnatural
hags’, which Lear uses against Goneril and Regan. More generally, it is
the location of the moorland, the blasted heath, that evokes King Lear.
The open space which isolates Wuthering Heights also serves as refuge
and escape; it is the place of lovers and fugitives, ghosts and madmen, and
like Lear’s heath, provides a way in which identities are shaped in the novel
and where universal questions can be asked. Heathcliff’s very name brings
together both a sense Lear’s blasted heath and of Dover Cliff from which the
blinded Gloucester tries to throw himself. Here, in Heath-cliffs name and
person the extremes of human suffering become intertwined: the heath of
Lear’s pain unites with the cliff of Gloucester’s to give ‘Heathcliff.’ Hamlet
is evoked with the appearance of the ghost of Catherine Earnshaw to Mr.
Lockwood, which, like the Ghost of Hamlet’s father, returns to a private
chamber, as though looking for the love it left behind. Later, Heathcliff, like
Hamlet, will have a conversation with the sexton in the graveyard and hold
Catherine’s, rather than Yorick’s, dead face. Like Hamlet, Heathcliff too is
reminded of bodily decay:
I got the sexton, who was digging Linton’s grave, to remove the
earth off her coffin lid, and I opened it. I thought, once, I would
have stayed there, when I saw her face again—it is hers yet—he
had hard work to stir me; but he said it would change, if the air
blew on it. 39
Macbeth is evoked first of all to make Wuthering Heights into a house of

witches, who control fate. On going downstairs ‘to the lower regions’ after
seeing the ghost of Cathy, Mr. Lockwood says ‘nothing was stirring except
a brindled, grey cat, which crept from the ashes, and saluted me with a
querulous mew’.40 ‘Thrice the brinded cat hath mewed’ says the First Witch
at the beginning of act four, scene one before they conjure up the spirits for
Macbeth. A sentence later, Mr. Lockwood names the cat ‘Grimalkin’, the
name of the witches’ cat as mentioned in the first scene of the play: ‘I come,
Grimalkin’. On the evening that Heathcliff disappears, there is a violent
storm which knocks down ‘a portion of the east chimney stack’.41 A similar
storm takes place on the night of King Duncan’s murder:
LENNOX The night has been unruly: where we lay,

Our chimneys were blown down;
and, as they say,
Lamentings heard i’th’air; strange
screams of death.
(Macbeth, II. 3. 53)
Catherine Earnshaw, like Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, is tormented by

nightmares: ‘I dread sleeping, my dreams appal me’.42 Over her dead body,
Heathcliff echoes the occasion, and the words, of Macbeth on seeing the
ghost of Banquo:
The murdered do haunt their murderers. I believe—I know that

ghosts have wandered on earth. Be with me always—take any
form—drive me mad!43
In contrast, Macbeth does not want to see the ghost of Banquo: ‘Take any shape
but that, and my firm nerves | Shall never tremble’ (Macbeth, III. 4. 100).
Antony and Cleopatra is suggested when Catherine Earnshaw says
‘Every Linton on the face of the earth might melt into nothing, before I
could consent to forsake Heathcliff!’.44 ‘Melt Egypt into Nile!’ says Cleopatra
116 Paul Edmondson
when she hears of Antony’s marriage to Octavia (Antony and Cleopatra, II.
5. 78); ‘Let Rome in Tiber melt, and the wide arch | Of the ranged Empire
fall’, says Antony in describing his love to Cleopatra (Antony and Cleopatra,
I. 1. 35). Finally, in sharing the same grave Heathcliff and Cathy evoke
something of the transcendental love of Antony and Cleopatra themselves,
of whom it is said:
No grave upon the earth shall clip in it

A pair so famous.
(Antony and Cleopatra, V. 2. 353)
Of all Shakespeare’s plays, it is The Tempest that features most strongly in

Wuthering Heights. The Tempest is the play with which the Brontës might have
felt the deepest affinity. As children, they presided over their imaginary Glass
Town, Prospero-like, as four genii: Tallii (Charlotte), Brannii (Branwell),
Emmii (Emily), and Annii (Anne). In a letter of 20 August 1840, Charlotte
Brontë signs herself ‘Caliban’, due to the quality of her handwriting for which
she apologizes at the end of the letter:
Preserve this writing as a curiosity in calligraphy—I think it is

exquisite—all brilliant black blots, and utterly illegible letters.45
In Wuthering Heights there are many Calibans. They begin to appear when
Heathcliff, like Prospero, is in full control of the Heights. Nelly Dean goes
to visit Hindley and meets Hareton at the gate, ‘an elf-locked, brown-eyed
boy setting his ruddy countenance against the bars’.46 He throws a flint at
her which strikes her bonnet,
and then ensued, from the stammering lips of the little fellow, a
string of curses which, whether he comprehended them or not,
were delivered with a practised emphasis, and distorted his baby
features into a shocking expression of malignity. [. . .] ‘Who has
taught you these fine words, my barn?’ [asks Nelly, to which Hare-
ton eventually replies] ‘Devil daddy [. . .] Daddy cannot bide me,
because I swear at him.’47
We also learn that Heathcliff tells Hareton to swear at his own father,
Hindley. Shortly after this exchange, Heathcliff, rather than Hindley,
appears at the door and Nelly runs away ‘as scared as if [she] had raised
a goblin’.48 Nelly does not run away in disgust or out of pride, but in
terror. Her account does not explain exactly why she runs away, and
with the reference to ‘goblin’—with possible echoes of Hamlet’s ‘goblin
damned’—the reader is left to surmise that something darkly magic might

have induced her sudden fear. With its Shakespearian suggestions of The
Tempest, this episode makes Hareton seem the Caliban to Heathcliff ’s
wicked Prospero:
You taught me language, and my profit on’t

Is I know how to curse. The red plague rid you
For learning me your language!
(The Tempest, I. 2. 365)
Heathcliff is later described as an ‘evil genius’.49 However, he too is capable

of being like Caliban. Hindley locks him out of the Heights in the snow
and Nelly notices Heathcliff ’s ‘sharp cannibal teeth’.50 It is as if Heathcliff
and Hindley are during this episode competing for the role of Prospero and
subsequent rule over Wuthering Heights. Hareton’s position again sounds
like Caliban’s at the end of the same chapter. Heathcliff is victorious and
Hindley’s inheritance is lost. Hareton, unlike Caliban, remains ignorant of
his father’s (or, in Caliban’s case, mother’s) misfortunes. Caliban’s tragedy
is that he remembers that he has a claim on the island through Sycorax
his mother, and that Prospero has taken it from him; Hareton’s tragedy is
detailed at the end of chapter seventeen by Nelly:
In that manner, Hareton, who should now be the first gentleman

in the neighbourhood, was reduced to a state of complete depen-
dence on his father’s inveterate enemy; and lives in his own house
as a servant deprived of the advantages of wages, and quite unable
to right himself, because of his friendlessness, and his ignorance
that he has been wronged.51
There is a final Shakespearian sting in Emily’s wild tale. Lockwood

discovers ‘the three head-stones’ on the slope next to the moor: Edgar’s,
Cathy’s and Heathcliff ’s. And then come the final, beautiful and justly famous
concluding lines:
I lingered round them, under that benign sky watched the moths
fluttering among the heath and hare-bells; listened to the soft
wind breathing through the grass; and wondered how any one
could ever imagine unquiet slumbers, for the sleepers in that
quiet earth.
As well as the clear allusion to the musical ending of Samuel Taylor

Coleridge’s great conversational poem ‘Frost at Midnight’, in which the
118 Paul Edmondson
frost continues to perform its ‘secret ministry [. . .] unhelped by any wind’,

‘Quietly shining to the quiet moon’, there is a direct allusion to Shakespeare’s
Richard III In act three, scene two, an anonymous messenger from Lord
Stanley sounds out the loyalty of Lord Hastings to Richard. Lord Stanley,
we learn, has been unable to sleep, racked by dreadful dreams of the boar.
Hastings replies:
Tell him his fears are shallow, without instance.

And for his dreams, I wonder he’s so simple,
To trust the mock’ry of unquiet slumbers.
(Richard III, III. 2. 22–24)
Hastings’s speech is painfully and brutally ironic, since just a few moments
later than this in stage time, Richard will order his head to be cut off.
Lockwood, too, is being ironic. He wants to believe that the dead will not
walk again, but everything he has experienced and heard about thus far
proves otherwise. By evoking Richard III, Emily is very definitely locating
the final impressions of her novel in a world of angry ghosts, violence, and
revenge. After hearing all the accounts from Nelly Dean, Lockwood will
no doubt be unquiet for some time to come, and so indeed might we by the
time we’ve reached the haunting end of Emily’s masterpiece.
These Shakespearian allusions that contribute so powerfully to the mood
and drama of Emily Brontë’s novel are by no means exhaustive. Likewise, it
has been impossible to cover other connections to Shakespeare that can be
found in Emily and Charlotte’s poetry. More articles need to be produced on
this subject. And that is before one turns to Anne and Branwell. I want to
go back to where I started from, though, and to Virginia Woolf ’s account of
Shakespeare’s forgotten but imaginary sister, Judith. From a consideration of
Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, it is clear that,
although for the purposes of Virginia Woolf ’s necessarily feminist argument,
Shakespeare’s sister’s grave is long-forgotten—‘buried at some cross-roads
where the omnibuses now stop outside the Elephant and Castle’—she is also
to be found in the Brontë family vault in Haworth Church and, in the case of
Anne, high on a cliff, in a churchyard overlooking Scarborough.
No t e s
1. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, ed. by Hermione
Lee (London: Chatto and Windus, 1984), p. 3.
2. Woolf, p. 65.
3. Woolf, pp. 44–45.
4. Woolf, pp. 104–105.
5. Woolf, p. 46.
6. All quotations from Shakespeare’s work, unless otherwise stated, are from:
William Shakespeare, The Complete Works, Compact Edition, ed. by Stanley Wells,
Gary Taylor, John Jowett, and William Montgomery (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1988).
7. William Shakespeare, King Lear, ed. by R. A. Foakes (Walton-on-Thames:
Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd., 1997), p. 308.
8. Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, ed. by Tony Tanner (Harmondsworth: Pen-
guin, 1966; repr. 1985), p. 335.
9. Lynne Reid Banks, Dark Quartet: The Story of the Brontës (London: Wei-
denfelg and Nicolson, 1976; repr. Penguin, 1986), p. 66.
10. See Chorlotte’s letters of: 5 December 1849, 14 February 1850, 19 Decem-
ber 1849 for references to Macready, Wooler and Forster respectively, in The Letters
of Charlotte Brontë, ed. by Margaret Smith, vol. 2. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000).
Her letter to Ellen Nussey is in Smith, vol. 1 (1998).
11. Women’s Revisions of Shakespeare, ed. by Marianne Novy (Chicago and
Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), p. 2.
12. Adrian Poole, Shakespeare and the Victorians (London: Thomson Learning,
2004), p. 106.
13. Charlotte Brontë, Shirley, ed. by Andrew and Judith Hook (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1974), pp. 114–115.
14. Shirley, p. 116.
18. Poole, p. 106.
19. Elizabeth Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Brontë, ed. by Alan Shelton (Har-
mondsworth: Penguin, 1975; repr. 1985), p. 94.
21. John Forster on W. C. Macready as Coriolanus at the Theatre Royal,
Covent Garden, London, from The Examiner, reprinted in Dramatic Essays by John
Forster, George Henry Lewes, ed. by William Archer and Robert W. Lowe (1896), pp.
54–65, quoted in Shakespeare in the Theatre: An Anthology of Criticism, ed. by Stanley
Wells (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 81.
22. Margaret J. Arnold, ‘Coriolanus Transformed: Charlotte Brontë’s Use of
Shakespeare in Shirley’, in Women’s Revisions of Shakespeare, ed. by Marianne Novy
(Chicago and Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), pp. 76–88 (p. 83).
23. Novy, p. 9.
24. The Brontë’s: The Critical Heritage, ed. by Miriam Allott (London: Rout-
ledge and Kegan Paul, 1995), p. 141.
25. Allott, p. 181.
26. Allott, p. 411.
27. Allott, p. 411.
28. Allott, pp. 446–447.
29. Woolf, p. 62.
30. Melvin R. Watson, ‘Tempest in the Soul: The Theme and Structure of
Wuthering Heights’, in Nineteenth-Century Fiction (1949–1950), pp. 87–100 (p. 90).
31. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The
Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (London: Yale Uni-
versity Press, 1979), pp. 259, 285.
120 Paul Edmondson
32. Inga-Stina Ewbank, ‘Emily Brontë and Immortality’; a talk given at the
end of the service of remembrance for Emily Jane Brontë, 19 December 1998.
33. Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, ed. by David Daiches (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1965; repr. 1985), p. 48.
34. Wuthering Heights, pp. 120–121.
35. Wuthering Heights, p. 302.
36. Poole, p. 144.
45. Gaskell, p. 205.
48. Wuthering Heights, pp. 148–149.
B irgitta B erglund
In Defence of Madame Beck
V Introduction
illette is Charlotte Brontë’s last novel and arguably her most accomplished
work. It has never been the most popular one, though. That has always
been Jane Eyre with its passionate heroine, Byronic hero, dramatic plot, and
happy ending. Part of the reason why Villette has never been a popular novel
is obviously that it has none of these things: the heroine, Lucy Snowe, is
quiet, secretive, self-righteous, and singularly unhappy for most of the novel;
the hero, Paul Emanuel, is a little choleric school-master who has none of
the powerful masculinity of Mr Rochester; the plot, although seething with
repressed feelings and containing some memorable scenes, can hardly be
called dramatic; and, finally, the ending is not a happy one — Lucy Snowe
never gets her ‘angry little man’.
However, part of the problem also seems to be connected to the
point of view. The choice of a first-person narrator, together with the fact
that the text is undeniably to some extent autobiographical, dealing with
Charlotte Brontë’s unhappy experiences in Brussels some years prior to the
writing of the book, has led to an unfortunate habit of reading Villette as
merely thinly veiled autobiography. This way of reading is obvious in the
very first reviews and comments on the publication of the novel1 and was
confirmed after Elizabeth Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Brontë, which presented
Brontë Studies, Volume 30, Number 3 (November 2005): pp. 185–211. © The Brontë
Society 2005.
121
122 Birgitta Berglund
Charlotte as a pious and suffering tragic heroine, an Angel in the House

surrounded by the wild Yorkshire moors, rather than as an experienced artist
and early-Victorian intellectual. Readers from Thackeray onwards have thus
unhesitatingly equated Lucy Snowe with Charlotte Brontë and assumed that
Lucy’s experiences, opinions, and prejudices are identical with Charlotte’s.
For instance, Juliet Barker, in her excellent 1994 book on the Brontës, warns
against ‘literalists [who] argue the facts of the Brontës’ lives from their fiction,
which they persist in regarding as autobiographical’2 — and then goes on to
do precisely that when she comes to Villette.3
Thus it is generally taken for granted not only that Paul Emanuel and
Madame Beck are portraits of Monsieur and Madame Heger, but also that
what Lucy Snowe tells us of these fictional characters should be taken as
the author’s own words about their originals, the only question being to
what extent Charlotte Brontë is ‘right’ — i.e. to what extent Monsieur and
Madame Heger were really like this. Such an attitude is doubly surprising.
Firstly, because Lucy Snowe is far from a reliable narrator; as many readers
have noted, she frequently equivocates and suppresses facts both to the reader
and to the people around her. Secondly, because the author herself, on several
separate occasions, clearly distanced herself from her narrator. In one letter
she refers to Lucy as ‘morbid and weak’;4 in another she states: ‘[. . .] I am
not leniently disposed towards Miss Frost — from the beginning I never
intended to appoint her lines in pleasant places’.5
Lucy Snowe’s feelings for Paul Emanuel have indeed been questioned
by readers who have failed to see his charm. When it comes to Madame
Beck, however, readers and critics alike seem to have accepted the narrator–
protagonist’s judgement of her; and since Lucy strongly dislikes Madame Beck,
she has been regarded as an unlikeable woman. Although there are a fair number
of critics who have come to the defence of Madame Heger, claiming that this is
an unfair portrait of her, nobody so far seems to have defended Madame Beck.
However, it is my intention to show that the portrait given of Madame
Beck is actually that of a woman who is both admirable and likeable, and that
the overwhelmingly negative attitude towards this character is due partly to
an unwillingness to appreciate strong and successful women characters and
partly to the persistent habit of reading Villette as autobiography. Regarding
Lucy Snowe as a self-portrait of the author is a habit which — maintaining
the image of Charlotte Brontë as a tragic heroine writing true life romances —
ultimately denies her powers as a creative writer able to handle her materials
with the mature author’s distance and control.
The Narrator
That the portrait of Madame Beck is a negative one seems, as stated above, to
be taken for granted by virtually all critics of the novel: ‘The fair, compact, neat,
able and false Madame Beck with her system of surveillance, her spying in list
slippers, her reading of other people’s letters, her coldly practical world views,
was so like Madame Heger as to make Charlotte anxious to prevent a French
edition of Villette’, wrote Phyllis Bentley in 1947,6 while Valerie Grosvenor Myer
in 1987 claimed that ‘[i]t is possible to feel considerable sympathy for Madame
Heger, watching the plain, clever, intense young Anglaise falling in love with
Monsieur, and behaving correctly to protect her marriage, only to find herself
recognizably vilified in print’.7 More recently Sue Lonoff also sympathizes
with the Hegers in this regard: ‘Apparently the Hegers never read The Professor,
whose Zoraïde Reuter they might have found even more offensive than Villette’s
Modeste Beck. But to anyone aware of Charlotte’s originals, Villette (which they
did read) was sufficiently vengeful, a vilification of the woman whose sole fault
had been to see what Charlotte hid from herself ’.8 In The Oxford Companion
to the Brontës, Madame Beck is likewise said to be ‘in essence an acid portrayal
of Mme Zoë Heger’.9 She has been described as ‘calculating’,10 ‘dissembling’,11
‘dangerous’,12 ‘ruthless’,13 and ‘evil’;14 there are references to ‘Madame Beck’s
“hollow system”, where all is stealth, uncertainty, and latent hostility’,15 to
‘Madame Beck’s shrewdness, her cold rationality, her open commitment to
self-interest’,16 and simply to her ‘villainy’.17 The character and extent of this
villainy may be defined in slightly different ways by different critics depending
on their theoretical positions, but whether Freudian, Marxist, or feminist, they
all seem to agree about its existence. Thus according to one ‘Madame Beck [. . .]
functions simultaneously as a suppressive figure of espionage and hidden
control and as a sexually aggressive opportunist’;18 to another she is ‘a spying,
scheming little bourgeoise who [. . .] is finally exposed as a thorough villain’,19
while a third claims that ‘Madame Beck is Charlotte Brontë’s last and best
variant of the Bitch-Rival [. . .]’.20 In the introduction to the Everyman edi-
tion of the novel from 1992, we are told not only that ‘Madame Beck, with
her shoes of silence, her face of stone and her dead heart, is clearly a witch’,21
but also that she is ‘gradually revealed as a death-dealing monster of selfishness
and deceit’.22
To what extent are these allegations supported by the text? That depends,
of course, on how we read that text. Above all, it depends on how we read
Lucy Snowe. It is certainly not difficult to find examples of Lucy accusing
Madame Beck of being, variously, cold, hard, hostile, worldly, false, jealous,
deceitful, sensual, unloving, untrustworthy, and dangerous. But Lucy is, as was
pointed out above, a notoriously unreliable narrator as well as a somewhat
dishonest character. Apart from the fact that she sometimes jumps to faulty
conclusions, she also lies, equivocates, and, above all, withholds and suppresses
facts. She does this both in her relations to the other characters in the book
and in her function as narrator.23
Thus, although it is not surprising that a fourteen-year-old girl does not

let on to the people around her that she has a crush on the sixteen-year-old
son of the family she is staying with, it is somewhat surprising to the reader
that Lucy-the-narrator only indicates this after ten years and some two
hundred pages of the story have passed. Even then it is done in an oblique
way, when Lucy-the-character encounters the portrait of John Graham as a
boy in Mrs Bretton’s home in Villette and reflects:
Ah! That portrait used to hang in the breakfast-room, over the

mantel-piece: somewhat too high, as I thought. I well remember
how I used to mount a music-stool for the purpose of unhooking
it, holding it in my hand, and searching into those bonny wells of
eyes, whose glance under their hazel lashes seemed like a pencilled
laugh; and well I liked to note the colouring of the cheek, and the
expression of the mouth. I hardly believed fancy could improve on
the curve of that mouth, or of the chin; even my ignorance knew
that both were beautiful, and pondered perplexed over this doubt:
How was it that what charmed so much, could at the same time
so keenly pain?24
It is even more surprising that when meeting John Graham in

Villette and actually recognizing him in ‘Dr John’ of the pensionnat, Lucy
never mentions this either to the reader or to John Graham himself. Even
though she is so struck by the realization that she involuntarily gives away
her surprise, and John Graham asks her what the matter is — thus giving
her an easy opportunity — she refuses to tell him. It is only when, some
hundred pages further on, Lucy has fainted in the street and been taken to
the Brettons’ home, that she reveals the situation to the reader and refers
back to the moment of recognition, adding: ‘To say anything on the subject,
to hint at my discovery, had not suited my habits of thought, or assimilated
with my system of feeling. On the contrary, I had preferred to keep the
matter to myself ’ (p. 248). The idea that her way of behaving could be seen
as both deceitful and rude does not seem to enter her mind, and the only
explanation she gives for her conduct is: ‘I liked entering his presence covered
with a cloud he had not seen through, while he stood before me under a ray
of special illumination, which shone all partial over his head, trembled about
his feet, and cast light no further’ (p. 248). Neither does Lucy make herself
known to Mrs Bretton, a kind and caring woman who is Lucy’s godmother,
until that lady herself recognizes Lucy. ‘I saw how it must end’, Lucy-the-
narrator then comments, ‘so I thought it best to anticipate’ (p. 249). If that
had not been the case, would she then never have made herself known to
the Brettons? Apart from being disturbingly dishonest, Lucy’s behaviour
on these occasions is highly irrational. She has absolutely nothing to gain

by it — on the contrary, she almost misses her only chance of regaining two
true friends in a situation where she is sick with loneliness. Taken together
with several other, less significant, occasions when Lucy likewise withholds
information from either the reader or the people around her, this way of
acting can only be seen as evidence of a habitually secretive and unreliable
personality, one who gathers knowledge about other people and hoards it for
the feeling of power it gives her.
Lucy also frequently equivocates: she avoids answering straightforward
questions from the people around her and is generally evasive or misleading
when giving her opinions. Because hers is the central intelligence of the
narrative, the mind through which the story is filtered and which chooses
what facts to reveal and what to withhold, it is necessarily more difficult to
prove that she actually lies to the reader, though. However, there are some
instances where this seems to be the case.
One is the case of the pink dress. Being neither rich nor beautiful, Lucy
makes a virtue out of necessity by keeping her mode of dressing plain to the
point of Quakerish. Then Mrs Bretton gives her a pretty, pink dress to wear
for a concert. Lucy is flustered and at first states that she will not wear it: ‘I
thought no human force should avail to put me into it. A pink dress! I knew
it not. It knew not me. I had not proved it’ (p. 283). When she does put it on,
it is, she claims, not of her own free will: ‘I found myself led and influenced by
another’s will, unconsulted, unpersuaded, quietly over-ruled. In short, the pink
dress went on, softened by some drapery of black lace. I was pronounced to
be en grand ténue, and requested to look in the glass. I did so with some fear
and trembling; with more fear and trembling, I turned away’ (pp. 283–284).
This is ambiguous. Why does Lucy turn away in fear from her reflection? Is
it because she is struck by her own plainness? Or is it because she actually
notices herself looking attractive? Graham’s ‘kind smile and satisfied nod’ (p.
284) when he sees her would seem to bear out this interpretation. Lucy claims
that she is afraid of being regarded as overdressed, and that she would much
rather have worn something dark and sober. However, ‘[s]ince Graham found
in it nothing absurd, my own eye consented soon to become reconciled’ (p.
284). Lucy’s choice of words here is consistently negative: ‘unpersuaded’, she
is only ‘reconciled’ to the wearing of the dress when the effect of it is ‘softened’
and she is assured that there is ‘nothing absurd’ in it. At no point either then or
later, when she is complimented on her dress by Ginevra Fanshawe, does she
admit that she likes the dress, or that she enjoys looking good, and she never
expresses any gratitude for Mrs Bretton’s gift. However, six months later Lucy
herself actually acquires a new pink dress for the May Day picnic with Paul
Emanuel, the man she is now more than half in love with. She even recreates
the exact effect of Mrs Bretton’s ‘drapery of black lace’ by wearing a black
silk scarf with it (p. 470). Again, Lucy denies all intention of looking pretty,
though. Her dress is not pretty, she claims, although M. Paul compliments
her on it, and the only reason for the pink colour is that it happens to be
cheaper and to wash better than any other colour (p. 471). This explanation is
so patently untrue that it is half comic, half touching.25 However, the whole
episode is typical of Lucy’s lack of candour, of how the reader can never take
her word for granted but has to scrutinize her behaviour in order to get an
indication of what her true feelings and opinions are.
Above all, Lucy denies her feelings on almost every occasion. Most
importantly, Lucy-the-narrator denies ever being in love with John Graham
Bretton. ‘I disclaim, with the utmost scorn, every sneaking suspicion of
what are called “warmer feelings”: women do not entertain these “warmer
feelings” where, from the commencement, through the whole progress of an
acquaintance, they have never once been cheated of the conviction that to
do so would be to commit a mortal absurdity’, she says (p. 335.) Again, the
statement is so obviously untrue in all its aspects that one cannot be sure that
Lucy expects to be taken seriously. It could, and perhaps would be, ironic if,
again, it were not so pathetic.
A similar, although minor, instance of Lucy denying her feelings, and
even her behaviour towards another person, is on the occasion when she
and Paulina de Bassompierre decide to learn German and therefore employ
a German mistress. Lucy gives a venomous description of this woman’s
clumsiness and vulgarity and how ‘her direct and downright Deutsch nature
seemed to suffer a sensation of cruel restraint from what she called our
English reserve; though we thought we were very cordial with her: but we
did not slap her on the shoulder, and if we consented to kiss her cheek, it
was done quietly, and without any explosive smack’ (p. 388). After a further
contemptuous comment on how Fraülein (sic) Braun, who is used only to
the laziness and stupidity of ‘foreign girls’, is awed by the intellectual ability
and rapid progress of her English pupils, as well as by their cold and proud
manners, Lucy placidly continues: ‘The young Countess was a little proud, a
little fastidious: and perhaps, with her native delicacy and beauty, she had a
right to these feelings; but I think it was a total mistake to ascribe them to
me’ (p. 388). Since everything that has been said in the previous paragraph
contradicts this statement, the reader again has to ask whether Lucy really
expects us to believe her.
Irrespective of what intentions we as readers ascribe to the fictional
character/narrator Lucy Snowe, the question of whether the author expects
us to believe this narrator is another one altogether. If we could disregard the
fact that Lucy Snowe ‘is’ Charlotte Brontë in Brussels (and that Madame Beck
‘is’ therefore Madame Heger), it would seem to be an obvious example of an
author who consciously uses the narrative strategy of an unreliable narrator
— one whose statements we are meant to see through, and one whose actions
we are meant to judge for ourselves.
Certainly, if we cannot trust Lucy Snowe’s comments about Fraülein
Braun, who is a very minor character, then how can we trust her when it
comes to Madame Beck — a person of great importance in Lucy’s life, a
person of whom Lucy has every reason to be jealous or envious? For one
thing, it should be remembered that Lucy Snowe describes Madame Beck
from the perspective of an employee. The relationship between employer and
employee is seldom an easy one even at the best of times; there is always an
element of inequality and dependence, and this must particularly be the case
when, as here, the employee does not have a separate home but is also part of
her employer’s household. It is clear from the text that Lucy is expected to ask
Madame Beck’s permission whenever she wants to leave the house, even when
it is to go and visit her friends in her hours off. There are many people who
would find this annoying; and Lucy is a fiercely independent soul. Thus she
declines the offer of becoming Paulina de Bassompierre’s companion (at three
times her present salary), partly because of the further sacrifice of liberty and
independence that such a post would involve and partly, it seems, because of
the very fact that she likes Paulina and wants to stay her friend, which would
not be possible if Paulina were to become her employer (pp. 382–383).
There are, in other words, strong reasons why we should adopt a very
cautious stance when considering Lucy Snowe’s words about Madame Beck,
and at the very least try to compare what Madame Beck actually seems to say
and do in the book with Lucy’s claims about her character and personality.
Lucy’s Accusations
So what are Lucy’s allegations exactly? First and foremost, the accusation
which Lucy comes back to on numerous occasions in the narrative, and
which is most often referred to by critics, is Madame Beck’s habit of spying.
This is certainly borne out by acts contained in the text. On the very first
meeting between the two, there is a hint of something of the kind as Lucy
does not immediately notice Madame’s coming into the room: ‘[S]he had
entered by a little door behind me, and being shod with the shoes of silence,
I had heard neither her entrance nor her approach’ (p. 127). How long had
she been standing there watching Lucy, unseen? is the unspoken question.
Later that night Madame Beck goes through Lucy’s things, and on other
occasions she reads Lucy’s letters and tries to eavesdrop on her when Lucy is
in the garden with either John Graham Bretton or Paul Emanuel. She also
freely admits to Lucy that her school is built upon a system of surveillance.
To Lucy, all this is proof of Madame Beck’s fundamental dishonesty,
of her deceitful character and general Jesuitism. But how justified is
such an opinion in view of the situation and setting depicted in the text?
Surveillance in various forms was the rule in most schools at the time, and
boarding schools in particular, in England as well as on the continent. It was
customary, for instance, for letters to be opened and read by the management
of the school to check that there was nothing improper in them.26 Nor is this
particularly surprising, since schools for girls were seen as institutions where
the acquisition of proper manners and morals was at least as important
as general knowledge. What makes Madame Beck different from other
headmistresses is not the fact that she keeps a watch on the girls and their
behaviour at all times, but that she does this so discreetly and tactfully, never
openly interfering unless it is absolutely necessary and always avoiding
confrontations and accusations.
Lucy is not surprisingly hurt when Madame Beck goes through her
things and reads her letters; but again, this is understandable. In running a
fashionable girls’ school Madame Beck is a businesswoman whose marketable
product is an approved model of upper-class femininity, which includes general
knowledge, elegant accomplishments, and, above all, impeccable conduct.
Any suspicion that one of the teachers at such an institution is lacking in
this respect would be damaging for the school, and thus for Madame Beck’s
livelihood. It should be remembered that Lucy Snowe turns up at the school
in circumstances which would probably make most proprietors turn her away
on the spot: unannounced, unexpected, in the middle of the night, and with
no references (not to mention the fact that she is a foreigner unable to speak
the language of the country). Still, we are told that Madame Beck is daring
enough, unconventional enough, and intelligent enough to decide to employ
Lucy on the strength of her personality alone. Seen in this light, the fact that
she searches Lucy’s things that night after she thinks Lucy is asleep is less
surprising than the fact that she employs her at all.27
The other occasions when Madame Beck ‘spies’ on Lucy are likewise
accounted for by circumstances. The first time is when she sees Lucy doing
something surreptitious with the English doctor in the garden after dark.
She then, naturally enough, walks down into the garden to see what is going
on. Characteristically, she avoids confrontations and accusations, gracefully
pretending that she just felt like an evening walk and treating Lucy in the kindest
manner possible. Later on she listens in on a meeting between Lucy Snowe
and Dr John, obviously to determine the degree of familiarity between the two
and whether anything untoward is going on. Finally, she reads Dr John’s letters
to Lucy. This may seem like an unforgivable violation of privacy; but again, it
is important to remember the context. A correspondence between a man and
woman not married or engaged to be married was considered highly improper
at the time. In fact, such a correspondence would be seen as proof of either a
secret engagement or an illicit liaison.28 For Madame Beck to be worried by
these letters and to want to make sure that there is nothing improper in them
is thus perfectly understandable. In fact, Lucy herself implicitly admits this —

she is pained by having her privacy violated, but not surprised or shocked at
Madame’s action. It is only when she has reason to believe that other people
have read her letters that she reacts by deciding to get rid of them.
This also points to the other objection to condemning Madame Beck
on the grounds of spying, namely that she is far from the only person in the
book to engage in such pursuits. As many readers and critics have noticed,
there is a general atmosphere of mistrust, deceit, and voyeurism in Villette.
Most notably, perhaps, there is Paul Emanuel, the man who gradually rises
to the position of the hero of the novel. He is the other person whom Lucy
suspects of having read her letters, the one whose right to do so she does not
accept. He is the one who silently watches Lucy from an adjoining room
when, believing herself to be alone, she has for once broken down crying,
thus triggering her outburst: ‘This was a strange house, where no corner was
sacred from intrusion, where no tear could be shed, nor a thought pondered
but a spy was at hand to note and to divine’ (p. 310). He regularly ransacks
the contents of Lucy’s desk, he has a key that makes it possible for him to
enter the garden of the school unseen, and, as he freely admits to Lucy, he
has taken a room overlooking the school garden, with the express purpose
of ‘observation’ — sometimes using binoculars. In contrast to Madame
Beck, Paul Emanuel has no rational reason for his behaviour, and there
is something decidedly disturbing about the notion of this middle-aged
bachelor watching the girls and the women teachers of the school for hours
on end, simply because, as he says, ‘it is my way — my taste’ (p. 453).
At this point of the story Lucy is indignant at M. Paul’s behaviour,
which she regards as immoral; but she too, although in a less methodical
fashion, is a persistent voyeur. On a number of occasions, Lucy watches other
people without making herself known to them — sometimes from a corner
of a public room, like the museum or the concert hall; sometimes in a public
space outdoors, like the school garden or the park where she follows first
Count de Bassompierre’s party, then Madame Beck’s on the night of the feast,
listening to their conversations; often, like M. Paul, from an adjoining room;
and several times from her bed, pretending to be asleep. It is after all only
because she pretends to be asleep, while really watching through half-closed
eyelids when her new employer comes into her room that first night at the
school, that Lucy knows of Madame Beck’s going through her things.
Several of these occasions could perhaps be explained — and have been
explained — with reference to Lucy’s vulnerable situation as an outsider and
a foreigner, and in general a person whom nobody takes notice of and who is
therefore left almost inevitably to play the part of an observer rather than a
participant. However, this is not the case when Lucy is a girl at Bretton; and
even then watching seems to have been her habit. When little Paulina Home
first arrives at Bretton and is trying to fight her tears at leaving her father, Mrs
Bretton tactfully tells Lucy to take no notice of the child who has gone to
sit in a corner of the room. ‘But I did take notice: I watched [. . .]’ says Lucy.
‘I observed [. . .] I heard [. . .]’ (p. 65) The next morning she pretends to be
asleep and again watches little Polly as she is washing, dressing, and saying
her prayers. Like Paul Emanuel, Lucy often really has no rational reason for
her watching: it simply seems to be her way — her taste.
In fact, the only person who has rational and understandable motives
for her watching is Madame Beck. She, too, is the only person who does not
really seem to relish the idea of spying in the way Paul Emanuel and Lucy
Snowe do. Even Lucy admits that ‘madame knew what honesty was, and
liked it’ (p. 135), and that she uses her methods of surveillance only because
it is the only way she knows to keep control of the girls under her care. There
is something convincing and almost moving about Lucy’s description of
how ‘[o]ften in the evening, after she had been plotting and counterplotting,
spying and receiving the reports of spies all day, she would come into my
room — a trace of real weariness on her brow — and she would sit down and
listen while the children said their little prayers to me in English’ (p. 135).
This is a single parent with three children to support, who works hard to do so
using the means available to her. Her methods may be wrong, but considering
the circumstances it does not seem quite so evident that she should be blamed
for using them.29
Still, blamed she has certainly been, and the main reason for this
seems to be a lack of discernment on the part of readers — even skilled and
experienced academic critics — when it comes to handling the point of view.
Lucy’s perspective is so all-encompassing, and as a narrator she is such a
powerful personality, that it is very difficult for a reader to slip out of her
moral universe and see things from another perspective than hers. Thus, since
it is not painful to Lucy to watch others but it is painful for her to be watched,
we accept Madame Beck’s watching as implicitly worse than Lucy’s.
Madame Beck’s system of surveillance is closely connected to her
kindness, her tactfulness, and her consistent habit of avoiding confrontation,
qualities which Lucy seems to have genuine difficulties in understanding
and which she therefore regards as deceitfulness. Lucy, for instance,
implicitly accuses Madame Beck of a lack of sincerity because of her habit
of never openly criticizing her staff. Instead she treats them all kindly, and
when displeased with somebody she simply keeps an eye on this person’s
behaviour while at the same time looking out for a substitute. The moment
she has found a better option, the offending person is dismissed and a
new employee takes his or her place. It can certainly be claimed that this
way of dealing with the staff is less honest than open criticism and rebuke
would have been. Still, the question is to what extent it would have been
possible for a woman in Madame Beck’s position to act differently, to be

openly critical or confrontational, and what would have been gained by
such a course of action. Many people — and women in particular — find
confrontations difficult to handle and try to avoid them. Apart from the
internalized suppression of aggression which is still typical of many women,
and which was certainly even more so at a time when the approved model
of femininity was the mild, soothing, supporting mother/daughter/ sister,
there is also the added problem that even today women who openly criticize
others or are openly angry or aggressive will run the risk of being seen as not
very feminine or ladylike. This would of course be particularly devastating to
a woman in Madame Beck’s situation, one who makes her living by selling
the acquisition of feminine and ladylike qualities. By not criticizing her staff
she also avoids resentment and bad feelings in what is not just her workplace
and her business but also her home. Again, while it is possible to claim that
Madame Beck’s methods are wrong (that you should not behave as if you
are pleased with an employee when in fact you are not) it seems very harsh
indeed to condemn her for using them.
Lucy is likewise critical of Madame Beck’s way of handling her children,
in particular Désirée, the eldest, who is a difficult child (‘vicious’, according
to Lucy, p. 157), given to fits of anger and destructivity as well as general
mischief. It is somehow implied by Lucy, and seems to be accepted by readers,
that the wickedness of this child is proof of her mother’s bad qualities and
the general evil of the house.30 Whatever the reason for the child’s behaviour,
Lucy is certain that Madame Beck’s way of treating Désirée is wrong. She
ought, according to Lucy, to ‘confront the child with her vices’ (p. 158), and
her failure to do so Lucy regards as a moral weakness. However, bringing up
children is a difficult task even at the best of times, and particularly so when
one is dealing with a highly strung child who has lost her father not so long
ago. Perhaps in the circumstances Madame Beck’s way — unfailing kindness
and patience, pretending that she does not notice bad behaviour instead of
rewarding it with her attention, avoiding violent scenes and punishments,
keeping the child close to her as much as possible — is just as efficient, and
certainly kinder.
It should also be borne in mind that Lucy consistently maintains that
all parents treat their children too leniently. Not only does she claim, when
speaking about the Labassecouriens, that ‘the indulgence of offspring is carried
by them to excessive lengths; the law of most households being the children’s
will’ (p. 166); she also sees Mrs Bretton as far too partial to her son, and
obviously too passive or lenient in allowing little Paulina Home some privacy
when grieving for her father’s absence. About the heartbreaking spectacle of
little Polly blissfully waiting on Mr Home when he unexpectedly visits them,
Lucy says: ‘Candidly speaking, I thought her a little busy-body; but her father,
blind like other parents, seemed perfectly content to let her wait on him, and
even wonderfully soothed by her offices’ (p. 72). The impression gained is of
a person (Lucy) who really does not like children — or who perhaps grudges
other children the happy childhood she herself never had.
It is all the more surprising, then, that Lucy also accuses Madame Beck
of not being affectionate and loving enough as a mother. The impression given
is that she is an efficient and caring mother to her children, doing all she
can for them and often worrying about what will become of them, although
she is obviously not a sentimental one. She does not, for instance, lose her
composure when Fifine, the middle child, has had a fall and broken her arm.
Instead she quickly summons a doctor and then assists him with a steady
hand, receiving praise for her calm, which is, he says, a thousand times better
than a misplaced sensibility (p. 160). Still, Lucy holds Madame Beck’s calm
and efficiency against her — because she is jealous of the compliment?
Lucy’s words about Madame Beck’s attitude towards her children are
worth citing in full because they are so untypical of Lucy. She claims that
‘[Madame] never seemed to know the wish to take her little children upon
her lap, to press their rosy lips with her own, to gather them in a genial
embrace, to shower on them softly the benignant caress, the loving word’
(p. 157). Can the person speaking here really be the same one who coldly
referred to Polly Home as ‘a little busy-body’, to Mr Home as ‘blind like
other parents’ and to Madame Beck’s eldest child as ‘that tadpole, Désirée
Beck’ (p. 556)? Lucy’s language on this occasion seems to break down into a
clichéd sentimentality which signals her lack of sincerity. She also claims to
love little Georgette, Madame Beck’s youngest daughter, presumably better
than Madame herself, since ‘to hold her on my lap, or carry her in my arms
was to me a treat’ (p. 188). It stretches the imagination to believe that Lucy
Snowe as we know her would consider it a treat to carry around any child,
let alone a child of Madame Beck’s. (And Georgette is not a tiny baby; she
seems to be about two or three years old.) In fact, this does not seem plausible,
unless it is, consciously or unconsciously, a way for Lucy of showing her moral
superiority to the child’s mother, who — or so she has told us — will not
generally carry or caress her children.31
It seems that Lucy is playing a double game: on the one hand she claims
for herself the right not to be judged by conventional standards, not to be
pressed into the mould of sentimental, Victorian femininity; on the other hand
she implicitly criticizes Madame Beck for not fitting into this mould. Lucy
repeatedly hints at Madame Beck’s lack of femininity, often by damning with
faint praise, as when she describes her employer’s administrative qualities:
I say again, madame was a very great and a very capable woman.
That school offered for her powers too limited a sphere: she ought
to have swayed a nation: she should have been the leader of a tur-
bulent legislative assembly. Nobody could have brow-beaten her,
none irritated her nerves, exhausted her patience, or over-reached
her astuteness. In her own single person, she could have comprised
the duties of a first minister and a superintendent of police. Wise,
firm, faithless; secret, crafty, passionless; watchful, and inscru-
table; acute and insensate — withal perfectly decorous — what
more could be desired? (p. 137)
To Victorian readers such a description of a woman might be seen

as damaging. To the modern reader, however, who is neither surprised nor
shocked at the idea of a woman lawyer, a woman Member of Parliament, a
woman police inspector or even a woman Prime Minister, and who accepts
that there must have been a number of more or less frustrated nineteenth-
century women with such qualities, this passage ought not to be automatic
proof of Madame Beck’s lack of either femininity or morality. Likewise, the
fact that this busy working woman sometimes has an ‘absorbed air and brow
of hard thought’ which Lucy smugly comments on as making her ‘look so
little genial’ (p. 138) can hardly in itself condemn her.32
Even so, Lucy assumes a very condemning attitude towards Madame
Beck because of her general briskness and lack of sentimentality; and this is the
more surprising since not only Lucy herself (with the exceptions mentioned
above), but also the people she respects, are very far from sentimental, and this
is a quality that Lucy approves of: ‘Indisputably Mr Home owned manly self-
control, however he might secretly feel on some matters’ (p. 71), she says about
little Polly’s fond father, and there is no doubt that this is meant as praise from
Lucy. Even more important is the fact that she describes her godmother in a
very similar way: ‘Mrs Bretton was not generally a caressing woman: even with
her deeply-cherished son, her manner was rarely sentimental, often the reverse
[. . .]’ (p. 64). Particularly when it comes to Mrs Bretton, this is a quality that Lucy
returns to several times, and always approvingly.33 Again it is necessary to ask
why qualities that are seen as praiseworthy in other characters are represented
as faults in Madame Beck, and the answer can only be: because Lucy says so.
Thus Lucy actually manages to condemn her employer’s most attractive
quality, namely her generosity. She tells us that Madame is always ready to open
her purse to the poor, that she participates freely in all sorts of philanthropic
schemes, and that she does so cheerfully. However — and here is the rub for
Lucy — she does so without any show of feeling, and although she ‘would
give in the readiest manner to people she had never seen’ (p. 137) she will not
be moved by the individual case. Madame Beck is, in other words, benevolent
for rational rather than sentimental reasons. Which is the more admirable
attitude must be a matter of opinion. It does seem, however, that regarded
from the point of view of results achieved, ‘the poor’ are just as well served
by a person who gives generously to organizations meant to alleviate their
conditions as they are by somebody who sheds tears over an individual case.
This was also the opinion of a number of writers from the eighteenth century
onwards who warned, in particular female readers, about the dangers of an
overwrought sensibility. One of them was Hannah More; and it is interesting
to note that the following passage is underlined in the Haworth copy of
More’s Moral Sketches: ‘Judgement is so far from a cooler of zeal, as some
suppose, that it increases its effects by directing its movements; and a warm
heart will always produce more extensive, because more lasting good, when
conducted by a cool head’.34 It is difficult not to side with Hannah More as
well as with ‘Dr John’ here and conclude that Madame Beck’s children are
better served by a cool-headed, efficient, and hard-working parent than by a
doting or a sentimental one.
Madame Beck’s Kindness and Generosity

Madame Beck’s generosity is worth stressing, as this a quality that is in
marked contrast to Lucy Snowe’s characteristics.35 Thus Madame not only
gives freely to the poor; Lucy is also compelled to praise the plentiful allow-
ances of food and drink in the school. The girls are well fed and taken care of,
and they all look healthy and blooming as a result. That this is not just good
policy by a shrewd proprietor of a school but a natural — and attractive —
quality in Madame Beck is further borne out by a number of instances when
she provides Lucy with nourishment. In fact, the very first thing Madame
does after she has decided to employ Lucy is to see to it that she is placed by
a warm fire and given a hot meal, having perceived that the girl is cold and
hungry. All the meals in the school are also well prepared and tasty. 36
Lucy has great difficulties in accepting this quality in Madame Beck,
however, and she is very ambivalent in her references to it. Thus, whereas
on the one hand she praises the fact that the food is good and abundant at
the pensionnat, she is consistently scornful of those who enjoy it. Ginevra
Fanshawe’s hunger at breakfast, for instance, which makes her exchange
her morning cup of coffee for one of Lucy’s rolls, is clearly held against her.
Likewise, when at the charity-concert Lucy notices some former pupils of
the school sitting above her in the royal compartment, she seems to console
herself for this fact — as well as for the fact that the girls are young, happy,
and beautiful — by gleefully thinking not only of their stupidity in class
but also of the fact that at least one of them had a hearty appetite, eating
large quantities of bread, butter, and fruit for lunch every day. Her smug
comment, ‘Here be truths — wholesome truths, too’, shows how damaging
she obviously feels this is to the girl’s character (p. 292). Lucy’s jealousy at M.
Paul’s protégée Justine Marie, who is also young, beautiful, and protected, is
likewise expressed in her scornful comment that ‘she looks well-nourished,

fair, and fat of flesh’ (p. 563).37
Lucy obviously feels that her smaller appetite makes her superior to
these young girls, not taking into account the fact that they are just that
— young, healthy, growing girls. But there is more to it than that. She seems
actually to grudge the girls their food, or their pleasure in it, just as she seems
in some ways really to dislike the generosity that supplies it. This attitude is
visible on the May Day picnic when Paul Emanuel treats the boarders and
teachers to a farmhouse breakfast, described by Lucy in the following way:
Clean knives and plates, and fresh butter being provided, half a
dozen of us, chosen by our professor, set to work under his direc-
tions, to prepare for breakfast a huge basket of rolls, with which
the baker had been ordered to provision the farm, in anticipation
of our coming. Coffee and chocolate were already made hot; cream
and new-laid eggs were added to the treat, and M. Emanuel,
always generous, would have given a large order for ‘jambon’ and
‘confitures’ in addition, but that some of us, who presumed per-
haps upon our influence, insisted that it would be a most reckless
waste of victual. He railed at us for our pains, terming us ‘des
ménagères avares;’ but we let him talk, and managed the economy
of the repast our own way (p. 473, emphasis added).
The passage is typical of Lucy’s narrative style in many ways: there is

a simple sensual pleasure in the description of the clean plates, fresh butter,
hot chocolate, and new-laid eggs, while at the same time there is a fear lest
there should be too much pleasure; she praises M. Paul for his generosity,
while at the same time disapproving of it; and she is evasive when it comes
to actual facts. Who are the ‘some of us’ referred to who, in spite of M. Paul’s
railings, manage to prevent him from being too generous? It seems unlikely
that they would include Madame Beck, who never openly opposes anybody
if she can help it, and who is herself consistently generous in matters of food
and drink; and it seems even more unlikely that any of the other teachers (not
to mention the pupils) would have the courage to go against M. Paul. It can
only be Lucy herself. Only she would actually enjoy a confrontation with the
hot-blooded little professor, and only she would be really pained by the idea
of too many delicacies.
The same troubled attitude to food and drink, bordering on the neurotic
or anorexic, is evident in Lucy’s description of her last meal with Paul Emanuel.
Here, however, the ambivalence seems to be resolved: there is pleasure but not
too much of it, there is generosity but it is tempered: ‘Our meal was simple: the
chocolate, the rolls, the plate of fresh summer fruit, cherries and strawberries
bedded in green leaves, formed the whole; but it was what we both loved better
than a feast, and I took a delight inexpressible in tending M. Paul’, she says
(p. 588, emphasis added). It is tempting here to question Lucy’s statement
that they both preferred this moderate enjoyment, asking whether it should
be taken at face value or perceived as an attempt on Lucy’s part to persuade
herself that she has finally succeeded in curbing M. Paul’s ‘reckless’ generosity,
thus removing him at last from any kinship with Madame Beck.38
It is certainly possible to see Lucy’s ambivalent attitude towards food as
part of a generally ambivalent attitude towards sensual pleasures in general
and sexuality in particular. The anorexic girl’s fear or hatred of the rounded
female body is often connected to a fear of sexual maturity and maternity
— sometimes also to a hatred of or rivalry with her own mother. Madame
Beck, who is referred to as ‘the little buxom widow’ by John Graham (p. 259),
and whom Lucy gradually comes to regard as her rival, is a sexually mature,
sexually experienced, and sexually attractive woman, whose motherliness is
consistently stressed in the text — usually in connection with her roundness
of figure. Lucy’s vehement attack on her employer at the end of the book
— ‘Madame [. . .] you are a sensualist. Under all your serenity, your peace, and
your decorum, you are an undenied sensualist [. . .] Leave me [. . .] Leave me,
I say!’ (p. 543) — seems to indicate that what is by now a hatred and fear of
Madame Beck, is indeed connected with a general fear of the sensuality that
the mature woman represents. Lucy also has the typical anorexic’s contempt
of or distaste for food and for people who enjoy eating at the same time as she
is obsessed with the idea of food and food metaphors. Her description of Dr
John’s eagerly awaited letter as ‘natural and earth-grown food [. . .] the wild,
savoury mess of the hunter, nourishing and salubrious meat, forest-fed or
desert-reared, fresh, healthful and life-sustaining’ (p. 318) is certainly rather
striking for a person who claims not to care very much for food. Later on
she also says about M. Paul’s letters that they ‘were real food that nourished,
living water that refreshed’ (p. 594).
Madame Beck’s generosity is not just limited to meat, drink, and money,
though. There is a generosity of spirit in her which makes her see the good
as well as the bad in any person and which makes it easy for her to give
praise. For instance, when Lucy asks her employer’s leave to go and visit the
Brettons, Madame instantly and graciously answers:
‘Oui, oui, ma bonne amie: je vous donne la permission de coeur et

de gré. Votre travail dans ma maison a toujours été admirable, rem-
pli de zèle et de discrétion. Vous avez bien le droit de vous amuser.
Sortez donc tant que vous voudrez. Quant à votre choix de connais-
sances, j’en suis contente; c’est sage, digne, louable’ (p. 376). 39
This kind comment is much more than the occasion demands and in no way
accounted for by any ulterior motives on Madame’s part. It seems simply to
be a spontaneous emanation of good will and appreciation. Lucy also admits
and refers to this deeper generosity when she says that although she is not
happy about the fact (discussed above) that Madame has read her letters, it
does not trouble her very much, because she knows that Madame will ‘see
things in a true light, and understand them in an unperverted sense’ (p.
378). The reason she is deeply troubled by the idea of M. Paul having read
them, though, is that ‘He, I believed, was not apt to regard what concerned
me from a fair point of view, nor to judge me with tolerance and candour’
(p. 379).
Obviously, fairness, tolerance, and ‘candour’ are qualities that Lucy as a
matter of course ascribes to Madame Beck.40 Unfortunately, these qualities do
not characterize Lucy. Her caustic comments on such things as the paintings
in the museum or the performances at the charity concert may be funny,
but they are also sad in that they speak of a personality who lacks the ability
to see the positive side of things or to enjoy uncritically. She consistently
sees the faults rather than the merits of people as well as performances, be
they the ‘usually large’ ears of the Labassecourien schoolgirls (p. 147), the
‘tawdry’ and ‘grossly material’ ceremonies of the Catholic Church (p. 516),
a translation of Shakespeare, which, ‘being French, was very inefficient’ (p.
416), or the countless deficiencies of foreigners in general.41 When this
judgemental attitude is applied to religious matters it comes close to simple
bigotry;42 when applied to other people it speaks of a lack of charity — all the
more notable since according to Lucy’s Protestant faith this is the greatest
of all human virtues. This lack of charity is perhaps particularly offensive
when Lucy’s disgust is directed towards defects which can only be regarded
as the calamities of nature, such as the mental deformity of the retarded
pupil, consistently referred to merely as ‘the cretin’, whom Lucy is in charge
of during the long vacation, or the physical deformity of Madame Walravens,
who is said to be ‘hideous as a Hindoo idol’ (p. 559).
In fact, even when Lucy is for once full of admiration for something
or someone, it is extremely difficult for her to express it. Thus, although she
finds it easy to contradict or quarrel with the man she is in love with, and
sometimes almost seems to enjoy hurting him, on the one occasion when
she would like to praise M. Paul (after his rousing speech at the Athénée)
she finds she cannot: ‘I would have praised him: I had plenty of praise in my
heart; but, alas! no words on my lips’ (p. 397).
This lack of charity or inability to show kindness to other people also
seems to be what makes Lucy mistrust Madame Beck’s kindness, which
she can only view as insincerity. Madame’s kindness in general and towards
Lucy in particular is stressed throughout the text: ‘There never was a mistress
whose rule was milder’, Lucy says (p. 134); ‘That worthy directress had
never from the first treated me otherwise than with respect’ (p. 376). It is
noteworthy that on the one occasion when Madame Beck could actually be
seen as unkind or inconsiderate, the author has taken care that we will not
make this interpretation. This is when the headmistress leaves Lucy alone
and in sole charge of a retarded pupil during the long vacation, and when
Lucy consequently has what we would now term a nervous breakdown. Lucy
then actually (and uncharacteristically) is made to defend Madame Beck. It
was not Madame’s fault, Lucy says; she could not know that Lucy would fall
ill, and as for the care of the girl it was meant to fall on the lot of a servant
who had left and in the rush of the holidays starting not been replaced. Her
breakdown Lucy attributes to a combination of her own personality and
unfortunate circumstances.
Nevertheless, almost every act of kindness by Madame Beck is either
viewed with suspicion or made fun of by Lucy. On the occasion when
Madame Beck has come down late in the evening to find out what is going
on in the school garden (where Lucy is handing over the billet-doux intended
for Ginevra Fanshawe to Dr John), Lucy expects to be reprimanded for being
out so late. This is not the case, however; instead Madame Beck’s behaviour to
her is kind and friendly. This may be seen as proof of her generosity of mind
in that she allows a person to be regarded and treated as innocent until guilt
is proved. After all, she has no right to suppose that Lucy is guilty and thus to
treat her unkindly, although her position does give her the right to investigate
in order to make sure whether this is the case. Lucy, however, interprets
Madame’s behaviour as proof of her duplicity and seems to feel that this gives
her the upper hand over her employer: ‘I caught myself smiling as I lay awake
and thoughtful on my couch — smiling at madame. The unction, the suavity
of her behaviour offered, for one who knew her, a sure token that suspicion of
some kind was busy in her brain’ (p. 182). This seems a case of projection —
the person whose brain is busy with suspicion is Lucy, who, herself unable
to show tactfulness and kindness, cannot accept these as positive qualities
without ulterior motives in other people.
Therefore, when Madame Beck comes to pay Lucy a visit during her
convalescence at La Terrasse (which is furthermore prolonged a couple of
weeks beyond the end of the vacation, thus leaving Madame without an
English teacher for this period), this attention is merely regarded as a nuisance
by Lucy, and explained away with the words ‘I suppose she had resolved within
herself to see what manner of place Dr John inhabited’ (p. 270). After she has
left, Lucy and John Graham together make fun of Madame Beck in a manner
which seems remarkably unkind, but which Lucy obviously relishes: ‘How he
laughed! What fun shone in his eyes as he recalled some of her fine speeches,
and repeated them, imitating her voluble delivery! He had an acute sense of
humour, and was the finest company in the world [. . .]’ (p. 271).43
Madame Beck’s habit of kindness and Lucy’s habit of belittling her
attentions are perhaps nowhere more obvious than on the occasion when
Lucy has fallen asleep one hot Sunday afternoon in one of the classrooms and
does not wake up until after sunset:
On waking, I felt much at ease — not chill, as I ought to have

been after sitting so still for at least two hours; my cheek and arms
were not benumbed by pressure against the hard desk. No wonder.
Instead of the bare wood on which I had laid them, I found a thick
shawl, carefully folded, substituted for support, and another shawl
(both taken from the corridor where such things hung) wrapped
warmly around me.
Who had done this? Who was my friend? Which of the teach-
ers? None, except St Pierre, was inimical to me; but which of them
had the art, the thought, the habit, of benefiting thus tenderly?
Which of them had a step so quiet, a hand so gentle, but I should
have heard or felt her, if she had approached or touched me in a
day-sleep?
As to Ginevra Fanshawe, that bright young creature was not
gentle at all, and would certainly have pulled me out of my chair, if
she had meddled in the matter. I said at last: ‘It is Madame Beck’s
doing; she has come in, seen me asleep, and thought I might
take cold. She considers me a useful machine, answering well the
purpose for which it was hired; so would not have me needlessly
injured [. . .]’ (p. 449).
As it turns out, it is actually M. Paul who is Lucy’s ‘friend’ on this

occasion, the one who had seen her asleep and covered her up. However,
this is not the relevant issue here. The interesting point is the way in which
the questions are posed in the text. Lucy asks herself not only who in the
school has ‘a step so quiet, a hand so gentle’ — we already know that the
proprietress has these qualities — but also who has ‘the art, the thought, the
habit, of benefiting thus tenderly’, and her own answer to these questions is
unequivocal: Madame Beck does. Then Lucy cannot feel content until she
has resolved this problem by once again denigrating Madame’s kindness and
ascribing it to ulterior motives: her action cannot in Lucy’s eyes be due simply
to human warmth or motherly care; it must therefore be the outcome of cold
economic calculation.44
Madame Beck’s kindliness and warmth are also manifested in the
fact that she possesses the ability to make friends. In her free time she is
consistently — and in marked contrast to the solitary and lonely Lucy, who has
no such ability — mentioned as being in the company of friends. Admittedly,
the word ‘friends’ in the nineteenth century still retained some of its older
meaning of ‘family’ or ‘relations’. Still, the expressions used in connection
with Madame Beck seem to point to a wider circle of acquaintance than
mere family. She spends the summer holidays ‘at a cheerful watering place
with her children, her mother, and a whole troop of friends who had sought
the same scene of relaxation’ (p. 230); she sits in the evening ‘in the salle à
manger with her mother and some friends’ (p. 323); and she spends a spring
Sunday in the garden with ‘a gay party of friends, whom she had entertained
that day at dinner’ (p. 448).
What is especially noteworthy is the fact that Madame Beck seems to
be willing to be Lucy’s friend — had Lucy allowed her to be so. From the
very beginning, when Lucy is just the nursery governess and Madame likes
to come and sit with her and the children in the evening, she shows her
appreciation of Lucy’s worth and her pleasure in Lucy’s company. Later, as
Lucy advances to the position of teacher, Madame Beck treats her with a
kindness and consideration which are quite remarkable. It is also clear that
she increasingly regards Lucy as an equal rather than as an employee. This is
shown for instance on the occasion when the directress has been called away
for a fortnight on account of a relative’s illness and returns home anxious
about her school. She then gives each of the teachers a present as a token
of her gratitude for their loyalty and efficiency in running the school in her
absence. Only Lucy receives nothing:
To my bedside she came at twelve o’clock at night, and told me she

had no present for me. ‘I must make fidelity advantageous to the
St Pierre’, said she; ‘if I attempt to make it advantageous to you,
there will arise misunderstanding between us — perhaps separa-
tion. One thing, however, I can do to please you — leave you alone
with your liberty: c’est ce que je ferai.’
She kept her word. Every slight shackle she had ever laid on
me, she, from that time, with quiet hand removed. Thus I had
pleasure in voluntarily respecting her rules; gratification in devot-
ing double time, in taking double pains with the pupils she com-
mitted to my charge (p. 383).
This is not only a gesture of appreciation and recognition which stands

out in itself. Of all the characters in the book, I would claim that it is Madame
Beck rather than Paulina de Bassompierre who alone sees Lucy and respects
her for what she is. It is also a mark of tact and sensitivity and an offer of
friendship on equal terms which Lucy at least to some extent recognizes and is
grateful for. At this point it seems as if the two women might actually become
friends; and the relationship that Lucy could have enjoyed with Madame
Beck would have been of a quite different quality from the one she has with
seventeen-year-old Paulina. Paulina is Lucy’s only friend and companion, but
not only is Lucy aware that this is a very temporary companionship which
will in effect end with Paulina’s marriage, there are also great gaps between the
two which preclude any real intimacy between them — gaps of age, of social
class, and of experience. A friendship between Lucy and Madame Beck, on
the other hand, would have been one of maturity and equality.
Lucy’s Jealousy
Why, then, does such a friendship never materialize? Why is Lucy for such
a large part of the book so bitterly, and seemingly unfairly, opposed to this
warm, friendly, intelligent, and generous woman, who is a good teacher, a
good mother, and a good housekeeper, and whose many qualities Lucy can-
not but acknowledge? The most obvious answer is simply sexual jealousy.
Almost from the very beginning Lucy sees Madame Beck as her rival, first
for the attentions of Dr John, later for M. Paul. For a great part of the book,
Lucy is, in spite of her protestations to the contrary, strongly attracted to
the masculinely handsome Dr John. He, on the other hand, while keeping
up a lighthearted flirtation with Madame Beck, barely notices Lucy. At this
stage Madame Beck is hardly a serious rival, though, as Lucy knows of Dr
John’s infatuation with Ginevra Fanshawe and obviously finds it unlikely
that he would fall for the older woman. Still, Madame Beck’s competent
handling of the situation makes Lucy’s awkward position stand out more
clearly. Like a Cinderella in her corner by the fire, Lucy — herself plain,
poor, shy, and reserved, but passionate — watches her employer’s youthful
looks, feminine fullness of figure, simple but elegant dress, easy manners,
and general ability to charm. There is genuine admiration in Lucy’s descrip-
tion of Madame Beck at this stage:
I scarcely think [. . .] that her intention in this went further than

just to show a very handsome man that she was not quite a plain
woman: and plain she was not. Without beauty of feature or ele-
gance of form, she pleased. Without youth and its gay graces, she
cheered. One never tired of seeing her: she was never monotonous,
or insipid, or colourless, or flat. Her unfaded hair, her eye with its
temperate blue light, her cheek with its wholesome fruit-like bloom
– these things pleased in moderation, but with constancy. (p. 167)
In other words, Madame Beck has all the qualities that Lucy lacks. Still, at
this stage Lucy is more fascinated than envious, and when Madame Beck,
watching her own reflection in the mirror, finally realizes the truth that
Lucy has seen all along, that she is too old to attract Dr. John, Lucy warms
to her: ‘Never had I pitied madame before, but my heart softened towards
her, when she turned darkly from the glass. A calamity had come upon
her. That hag disappointment was greeting her with a grisly ‘all-hail!’ and
her soul rejected the intimacy’ (p. 170). In spite of the obvious differences
between Madame Beck and Lucy, there is a strong element of identification
in this passage; and as Lucy sees Madame show real strength of character in
overcoming her disappointment, the identification as well as the admiration
grows even stronger:
I believe madame sermonized herself. She did not behave weakly,

or make herself in any shape ridiculous. It is true she had neither
strong feelings to overcome, nor tender feelings by which to be
miserably pained. It is true likewise that she had an important
avocation, a real business to fill her time, divert her thoughts, and
divide her interest. It is especially true that she possessed a genu-
ine good sense which is not given to all women nor to all men;
and by dint of these combined advantages she behaved wisely,
she behaved well. Brava! once more, Madame Beck. I saw you
matched against an Apollyon of a predilection; you fought a good
fight, and you overcame! (p. 171)
There are in fact many points of similarity between Lucy and Madame
Beck.45 They have both, to begin with, fallen from the position of a pro-
tected middle-class wife or daughter to a state of things where they have
to provide for themselves.46 The options were few for such women at that
time, and between the two of them they fairly cover them: Lucy first works
as a nurse/companion, then as a nursery governess, and finally as a teacher,
while Madame Beck opens a school. Both of them are intelligent, hard-
working, and good at their work; and they both recognize these qualities in
each other. At the beginning of their acquaintance Lucy admires Madame
Beck’s administrative ability and her generally pleasant and sensible way of
running the school. She also praises Madame Beck’s qualities as a teacher:
‘[S]he taught well’, Lucy says in the early part of the book (p. 225), and even
towards the end, when matters between them are more fraught, Lucy likes
to listen to Madame’s ‘orderly and useful lessons’ (p. 491) and admits to being
‘pleased and edified with her clear exposition of the subject (for she taught
well)’ (p. 492). Madame Beck, on her side, instantly recognizes Lucy’s abil-
ity when she overhears her teaching the little Beck children. As time passes,
Lucy comes to feel more and more strongly that what Madame can do, she
can do too, and she dreams of having the same success as her employer:
When I shall have saved one thousand francs, I will take a tene-
ment with one large room, and two or three smaller ones, furnish
the first with a few benches and desks, a black tableau, an estrade
for myself; upon it a chair and table, with a sponge and some
white chalks; begin with taking day-pupils, and so work my way
upwards. Madame Beck’s commencement was — as I have often
heard her say — from no higher starting-point, and where is she
now? All these premises and this garden are hers, bought with her
money; she has a competency already secured for old age, and a
flourishing establishment under her direction, which will furnish
a career for her children (p. 450).
There is a moment of mutual identification as well as appreciation between

the two on the morning of the great fête, when they happen to meet on the
stairs, the only women in the house to be dressed and ready so early, and
the only two to have chosen extreme simplicity and sobriety in their dress.
However, a note of difference and discord is present, too: Madame Beck
compliments Lucy on her dress, while Lucy is inwardly sarcastic both about
Madame’s taste and her compliment, and also implicitly envious of her jew-
els and the blooming complexion which has been pointed out several times
as Madame’s particular claim to beauty:
I had no flowers, no jewel to relieve [the simplicity of the dress];

and what was more, I had no natural rose of complexion. — How-
ever, in this same gown of shadow I felt at home and at ease; an
advantage I should not have enjoyed in anything more brilliant or
striking. Madame Beck, too, kept me in countenance; her dress
was almost as quiet as mine, except that she wore a bracelet, and
a large brooch bright with gold and fine stones. We chanced to
meet on the stairs, and she gave me a nod and a smile of approba-
tion. Not that she thought I was looking well — a point unlikely
to engage her interest — but she considered me dressed ‘conven-
ablement,’ ‘décomment,’ and la Convenance et la Décence were
the two calm deities of madame’s worship. She even paused, laid
on my shoulder her gloved hand, holding an embroidered and
perfumed handkerchief, and confided to my ear a sarcasm on the
other teachers (whom she had just been complimenting to their
faces). (p. 200)
Earlier in this article I emphasized the differences rather than the

similarities between Lucy and Madame Beck; however, in order to fully
understand Lucy’s growing hatred of Madame and her consequently warped

presentation of her, I believe that it is necessary to take the similarities into
consideration as well. It is Lucy’s partial understanding of Madame Beck,
her admiration for her and her initial identification with her that constitute
the key to her bitterness, as she comes to realize the truth: that she can never
be Madame Beck. Apart from the fact that Madame’s situation differs from
Lucy’s in that she has been born with good looks and is surrounded by a
family group consisting of her mother, her children, and several other close
relatives, she also has personal qualities of kindness, tactfulness, generosity, and
what would today be called social skills, which — together with the qualities
that she shares with Lucy (such as intelligence and diligence) — make for
professional as well as social success.
Lucy’s jealousy of Madame is therefore not just sexual rivalry; it goes
much deeper than that. With her unwillingness to confess the truth about
herself and her own feelings, though, Lucy refuses to see this, and instead
gradually focuses her jealousy on one person: M. Paul. As it becomes more
and more obvious that she is in love with him and that he is falling in love
with her, and as it is likewise obvious that his relatives are not happy about
Paul’s marrying Lucy, her jealousy and hatred of Madame Beck, who now
comes to represent all the obstacles to her happiness, take on hysterical
proportions. Since in this case there is also a religious element involved, and
since Lucy is vehemently anti-Catholic, she now sees plots and conspiracies
all around her.
However, if one looks at Madame Beck’s actions rather than at what
Lucy says about her presumed motives — and particularly if one keeps in
mind Lucy’s habit of ascribing evil intentions to quite innocent actions — it
is possible to interpret things in a much less sinister light. Thus, to begin with,
Madame, who is obviously much more worldly-wise than Lucy, notices the
lonely young English teacher falling in love with her kinsman. Knowing of
his confirmed bachelorhood (and having seen other teachers trying to lure
him into marriage but failing) but not wishing to offend Lucy by bringing
this up openly, she arranges for somebody else — Père Silas — to tell Lucy
about Paul Emanuel’s love story. Lucy of course sees through this stratagem
and, as could be expected, sees it as devious rather than tactful. Madame then
openly refers to Paul Emanuel’s other obligations and his determination not
to marry, finishing her conversation with the kindly suggestion: ‘But I hinder
you from taking refreshment, ma bonne meess, which you must need; eat
your supper, drink your wine, oubliez les anges, les bossues, et surtout, les
Professeurs — et bon soir!’ (p. 489).
Instead of accepting Madame Beck’s words at face value — as advice
kindly meant — Lucy immediately begins to perceive a conspiracy, and from
now on everything that happens is the work of ‘them’ trying to hinder her. It
is certainly true that when M. Paul’s friends realize that he is in love, they are
worried. However, this is not surprising, considering the context. Quite apart
from her personal qualities, which both Madame Beck and Père Silas do full
justice to, Lucy is a foreigner and a Protestant and such ‘mixed marriages’ were
far from common or even accepted. In The Brontës and Religion Marianne
Thormählen says: ‘Both in works of fiction and in real life, close and loving
proximity between Protestants and Roman Catholics was generally seen as
problematic, if not impossible. An untroubled marriage along these lines was
barely conceivable.’47 One need only imagine Lucy’s reaction were Paulina
de Bassompierre to fall in love with a foreigner and a Catholic, to see how
problematic such a union would be.48
It is also true, however, that when ‘they’ realize that M. Paul’s love for
Lucy is serious, ‘they’, i.e. Père Silas and Madame Beck, arrange for Lucy
to have religious instruction, a fact which seems to point to some kind of
acceptance of the situation. Even when Madame is still opposed to the idea
of Lucy marrying her cousin (after it is clear that Lucy will not convert to
Catholicism) her opposition has none of the vehemence of Lucy’s hysterical
jealousy, as she suddenly accuses Madame Beck of wanting to marry M.
Paul herself: ‘I knew she secretly wanted him, and had always wanted him’,
Lucy says, adding, ‘she did not love, but she wanted to marry, that she might
bind him to her own interest’ (p. 544). That Madame Beck should want to
marry her cousin in order to keep him as a teacher at the school hardly seems
believable, and there is no other foundation for this in the text than Lucy’s
sudden ‘intuition’ or ‘inspiration’ (p. 544). Lucy’s allegation that Madame has
‘secretly wanted’ M. Paul for a long time seems again more like a projection
of Lucy’s own feelings, as does her further statement: ‘In the course of living
with her, too, I had slowly learned, that [. . .] she must ever be a rival. She was
my rival, heart and soul, though secretly, under the smoothest bearing, and
utterly unknown to all save her and myself ’ (p. 544). In this scene Lucy lashes
out vehemently against Madame Beck, who takes her behaviour surprisingly
quietly and kindly, asking her to calm down, suggesting that she go to bed,
and offering her a sedative, which Lucy refuses. The next night Madame Beck
sees to it that Lucy is actually given an opiate — a circumstance which Lucy
presents as a poisoning. However, it should be remembered that opium was
really the only tranquillizer available at the time, as well as the only painkiller,
and considering Lucy’s hysterical state of mind, the excruciating headache
that she complains of, and the fact that she has had no sleep the preceding
night, Madame Beck’s having it administered it to her does not seem entirely
out of order.
As for Lucy’s accusations that ‘they’ keep M. Paul from her and lie to
her about his departure, they turn out to be not true: M. Paul has changed
the date of his departure of his own accord, and he has consciously kept out
of Lucy’s way simply because he has been afraid of unintentionally revealing

the surprise of the school he is preparing for her. Likewise, Lucy’s jealousy of
M. Paul’s young ward, whom she is sure ‘they’ mean for him to marry, turns
out to completely unfounded.
In a key passage towards the end Lucy does in fact admit that her
interpretation of facts is far from reliable:
I might have paused longer upon what I saw; I might have

deliberated ere I drew inferences. Some perhaps would have held
the premises doubtful, the proofs insufficient; some slow scep-
tics would have incredulously examined, ere they conclusively
accepted the project of a marriage between a poor and unselfish
man of forty, and his wealthy ward of eighteen; but far from me
such shifts and palliatives, far from me such temporary evasion of
the actual, such coward fleeing from the dread, the swift-footed,
the all-overtaking Fact, such feeble suspense of submission to her
the sole sovereign, such paltering and faltering resistance to the
Power whose errand is to march conquering and to conquer, such
traitor defection from the TRUTH. (p. 566)
What is ironically celebrated as truth here is in fact the opposite.

Admittedly Lucy is referring to a single incident, and one that took place when
she was under the influence of opium. Nevertheless this passage is significant
in that it illustrates Lucy’s general tendency to jump to conclusions, and in
particular her tendency to see things as generally worse than they are — and
it contains the author’s as well as the narrator’s admission that this is so. It is
this tendency in a deeply troubled personality which, together with her initial
identification, her growing jealousy, and her final hatred of her employer,
makes Lucy misinterpret Madame Beck’s actions and motives.
Lucy Snowe — ‘both morbid and weak’

In Lucy Snowe, Charlotte Brontë has painted a portrait of a repressed,
unhappy, even neurotic woman.49 One of Lucy’s ‘morbid’ characteristics
is her tendency to see other people in a very negative light. This tendency
is, for reasons discussed above, particularly pronounced in her attitude to
Madame Beck. The conscious artist Charlotte Brontë gives us a picture of
Madame Beck as a competent, successful, generous, and attractive woman.
At the same time she shows us how the character/narrator Lucy,50 project-
ing her own fears and insecurities on the woman she comes to see as her
rival, gradually constructs a picture of this woman first as an insincere and
cold-hearted businesswoman and then — as Lucy’s paranoia develops — as
a life-threatening monster.
We cannot blame Lucy for her weaknesses, since Charlotte Brontë

so clearly shows us how they are a result of her circumstances. As a young
woman with a great deal of sharp intelligence but with neither wealth nor
beauty, Lucy’s chances on the marriage market are slender to begin with, and
as a poor and plain spinster with no family connections she is a person whom
her society has no place for and would rather forget about, a person many of
the people in the book hardly notice. (Kate Millett has compared her to a
piece of furniture.51) In such circumstances how would it be possible for her
to develop into an easy-going, generous, and charitable woman? In the words
of Pauline Nestor, ‘Lucy Snowe is the true daughter of a society in which
repression and disguise are necessary strategies for women striving to behave
appropriately and all the less attractive features of her personality [. . .] can be
seen as direct reflections of social pressures’.52 Or as Charlotte Brontë put it
herself: ‘You say that she may be thought both morbid and weak unless the
history of her life be more fully given. I consider that she is both morbid and
weak at times — the character sets up no pretensions to unmixed strength
— and anybody living her life would necessarily become morbid’.53
Lucy is a product of her society, as are the other women in the book,
and one thing Charlotte Brontë shows us in Villette is how the oppressed
turn against one another instead of against their oppressors: Lucy, in fact,
has more reason to bear a grudge against Graham Bretton than against
Madame Beck. John Graham Bretton is a man who, although intelligent and
perceptive enough to see and appreciate the sterling qualities of Madame
Beck and Lucy, and to respond to them with a kind of careless flirtation,
nevertheless ultimately approves of, and rewards, the childish prettiness of
Ginevra Fanshawe and Paulina Home. Both of these are naturally clever girls
who could have developed into intelligent, independent, and mature women,
had such qualities been appreciated in their society. As it is they seem to
remain in a kind of perpetual girlishness, because that is what men like John
Graham Bretton appreciate and reward.54 Even worse than Graham Bretton
is M. Paul, a man who simply cannot cope with independent women: he spies
on the teachers as well as the schoolgirls in order to feel in control, and he
can really only behave decently to women if they are in a dependent position.
Thus he is kind to small children but as soon as the girls grow up he starts
to bully them, taking a sadistic pleasure in making them cry; he hounds the
only teacher who is not afraid of him from her post and can only be kind
to her when she is (because of him) destitute; he teaches Lucy but does not
like it when she succeeds in learning, and he is the one who, appalled by her
independence of mind, puts her in a corner of the art gallery, telling her to
study the dreary series of pictures of a conventional woman’s life.
Men like these are the real enemies of both Madame Beck and Lucy
Snowe, who are both, although in different ways and to different extents,
victims of patriarchal structures.55 Lucy, however, is so jealous of Madame

Beck’s relative success that she cannot see this, and instead of appreciating
another intelligent and independent woman who could have become her
friend, she turns against her.
Reading Charlotte Brontë

Lucy’s hostile picture of Madame Beck is not borne out by the text. Why,
then, when Lucy’s narrative unreliability is an established fact, has the over-
whelmingly negative picture of Madame Beck remained unchallenged?
One answer, paradoxically, has to do with Charlotte Brontë’s skill as an
author. We may not like Lucy, and we may not want to accept her view of
the world, but we are still drawn into that world by the emotional power she
exerts on the reader and the pain we feel in reading about her situation. This
emotional power affected readers from the very beginning and is probably at
the root of some of the more hostile reactions to Villette as a novel.56
There is also the reason of narrative patterns. In a story which presents
a young, poor and vulnerable protagonist pitched against an older, richer, and
stronger character, our sympathies seem automatically to go to the young
protagonist against his or her older adversary. In other words, if Lucy Snowe
is Cinderella (or Snow White, as her name seems to indicate), Madame Beck
has to be the wicked stepmother. This pattern is particularly prevalent when
we are dealing with female characters. According to Victorian notions of
femininity, which saw mental and physical weakness as an accepted, almost
laudable, part of the female character, a strong woman was by definition
unfeminine. Therefore, the more Madame Beck’s intelligence, strength, and
professional success are stressed, the more unfeminine she seems, and the
more she risks losing the readers’ sympathies. Within the text Paul Emanuel
mockingly refers to Madame Beck as ‘cette maîtresse-femme, my cousin Beck’
(p. 453), and John Graham Bretton, who initially praises Madame Beck for
her strength, ends up making fun of her. Readers, then as well as now, seem
to have taken the same attitude.
Another reason why readers have accepted Lucy Snowe’s rather than
Charlotte Brontë’s picture of Madame Beck is one that I have already
touched upon at the beginning of this article: the persistent habit of reading
Charlotte Brontë’s books in general, and Villette in particular, as only slightly
veiled autobiography. In other words, we still see Lucy Snowe as Charlotte
Brontë in the end, and if we do not accept Madame Beck as a true portrait
of Madame Heger, we still accept Lucy’s picture of her as Charlotte’s. This
image of the Brontë sisters as unconsciously pouring out their hearts in their
books, not really aware of what they were creating, is part of ‘The Brontë
Myth’ recently explored by Lucasta Miller.57 Miller shows that Charlotte
herself was to some extent responsible for the origin of the myth in her
‘Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell’, in which she tried to mitigate
criticism against her sisters’ works as being ‘coarse’: ‘Charlotte presented her
sisters as naïve artists responding only to the dictates of nature, rather than as
knowing and ambitious writers who had produced consciously constructed
novels. This defence combined her Romantic ideal of the natural genius with
the conventional idea of female modesty and simplicity which, she hoped,
would counterbalance public perceptions of the Bells as women unsexed.’58
She thus prepared the ground for Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Brontë, which
would firmly establish this romantic view of all three sisters, but perhaps
above all of Charlotte herself. Finally, the publication in The Times in 1913 of
Charlotte’s passionate letters to M. Heger created a sensation after which it
has been virtually impossible to separate the life from the work.
For any reader familiar with Charlotte’s story who has also read The
Professor there is also the added temptation of seeing Zoraïde Reuter as a kind
of blueprint for Madame Beck, or both as only slightly different versions of
Zoë Heger. Zoraïde Reuter is definitely a dishonest and unpleasant character,
who, although engaged to be married to another man, tries to seduce the
hero of the book and behaves cruelly and deceitfully towards the young, half-
English teacher–pupil who is the heroine. Mlle Reuter’s actions and character
will then imperceptibly influence our impression of Madame Beck, who to the
‘knowledgeable’ reader comes to be seen as just a more sophisticated version of
basically the same character. Indeed, this is the claim of many critics who read
Charlotte Brontë’s works in connection with her life.59
All artists use personal experiences as material for their work to
a greater or lesser extent, and Charlotte Brontë did so to a great extent.
However, the operative word is use, as the conscious artist uses the personal
experience as the raw material from which art is created. Thus, Charlotte
Brontë used her experiences — the general setting as well as individual
characters and incidents — of the Cowan Bridge school in Jane Eyre, but
that does not mean that Jane’s story is Charlotte’s. In the same way she used
her experiences — again the general setting as well as individual characters
and incidents — of the girls’ school in Brussels for Villette, but that does not
mean that Lucy’s story is Charlotte’s.
Lucy Snowe obviously has some similarities to Charlotte Brontë herself,
just as Jane Eyre has. In the character of Jane Eyre, the author perhaps
exaggerated the positive aspects of her own personality — the passion, the
independence, the belief in her own vision — in short, the vitality and strength
that make Jane’s story a success story. In Lucy Snowe, on the other hand,
I think she exaggerated the negative aspects of the same personality — the
inability to assert herself in company with others, the tendency to depression,
the morbidity — while showing these traits to be both the result of the life Lucy
leads and, to some extent, the reason for her difficulties and unhappiness.60
If we still think of Villette as to some extent autobiographical, or at least

as the artist’s way of dealing with traumatic experiences by sublimating them
into art, it is worth remembering that Charlotte Brontë was a woman who
could be extremely severe on herself and who believed in facing the truth,
however unpleasant.61 In Jane Eyre the author makes her heroine face what
Jane herself believes to be unrequited love by painting two portraits: one of a
rich, cherished, adored beauty, the other of a poor, plain, obscure governess —
making sure that she stresses rather than tones down the differences between
the two. It could be argued that this is what Brontë is doing in Villette, as she
shows the readers on the one hand the poor, plain, and embittered young girl
who rages at life’s unfairness, and on the other hand the mature, generous,
and attractive woman who seems to have it all.
But I do not think that it is necessary to bring in the autobiographical
aspect at all. Charlotte Brontë was a professional writer who took her own
writing seriously. She was hurt and distressed at the way in which readers
and reviewers tended to speculate about the person behind the work. More
than one hundred and fifty years have gone since the publication of Villette.
Is it not time to admit that Charlotte Brontë was indeed a creative writer
who, in this novel, plays a sophisticated narrative game with the reader? Is it
not time to accept that a strong, intelligent, and successful woman can be a
warm, generous, and likeable person? In short, is it not time to give Madame
Beck a chance?
No t e s
1. See The Edinburgh Review, April 1853: ‘It is clear at a glance that the
groundwork and many of the details of the story are autobiographic; and we never
read a literary production which so betrays at every line the individual character of
the writer’ (p. 387); the Spectator, 12 February 1853: ‘Villette is Brussels, and Cur-
rer Bell might have called her new novel “Passages from the Life of a Teacher in a
Girls’ School at Brussels, written by herself ”’ (p. 155); and the Guardian, 23 Febru-
ary 1853: ‘Lucy Snowe is Jane Eyre over again; both are reflections of Currer Bell
[. . .]’ (p. 128).
2. Juliet Barker, The Brontës (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1994), p. xix.
3. See the description of Charlotte Brontë returning alone to Brussels in 1843
where Barker starts off by describing the known facts of the journey, then goes on
to conjecture: ‘If, as seems likely, Charlotte used this adventure in her novel Villette,
she had a frightening experience which would have fully justified her aunt’s concerns
about the impropriety of a young woman travelling alone.’ This is followed by the
passage from the novel where Lucy is frightened by the boatmen fighting for her
fare. Barker then describes the rest of Charlotte’s voyage, her arrival in Brussels,
and her letter to Ellen Nussey ‘omitting to tell her about the incident on London Bridge
Wharf, which would undoubtedly have outraged her friend’s sensibilities’ (Barker, p.
410, emphasis added). In other words, Barker here goes from guessing that Charlotte
might have had the same experience as Lucy, to regarding this as a fact, the question
being not if this really happened but why Charlotte did not tell her friend about it.
4. Letter to William Smith Williams, 6 November 1852, in The Letters of
Charlotte Brontë, ed. by Margaret Smith, vol. III (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004),
p. 80.
5. Letter to George Smith, 3 November 1852, in Letters, vol. III, p. 78.
6. Phyllis Bentley, The Brontës (London: Home & Van Thal Ltd, 1947),
p. 77.
7. Valerie Grosvenor Myer, Charlotte Brontë: Truculent Spirit (London &
Ottawa, NJ: Vision & Barnes & Noble, 1987), p. 193.
8. Sue Lonoff, ‘Introduction’ in Charlotte Brontë and Emily Brontë, The
Belgian Essays, ed. and trans. by Sue Lonoff (New Haven & London: Yale University
Press, 1996), p. xix.
9. The Oxford Companion to the Brontës, ed. by Christine Alexander and Mar-
garet Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 30.
10. Lyndall Gordon, Charlotte Brontë: A Passionate Life (London: Vintage,
1995), p. 256.
11. Margaret Smith, ‘Introduction’, in Villette (Oxford & New York: Oxford
University Press, The World’s Classics, 1990), p. xi.
12. W. A. Craik, The Brontë Novels (London: Methuen, 1968), p. 171.
13. Robert Bernard Martin, The Accents of Persuasion: Charlotte Brontë’s Novels
(London: Faber & Faber, 1966), p. 180.
14. Lucasta Miller, The Brontë Myth (London: Vintage, 2002), p. 47.
15. Tony Tanner, ‘Introduction’, in Villette (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979),
p. 49.
16. Helene Moglen, Charlotte Brontë: The Self Conceived (New York: Norton,
1976), p. 206.
17. Tom Winnifrith, The Brontës and Their Background: Romance and Reality
(New York: Barnes & Noble, 1973), p. 55.
18. John Maynard, Charlotte Brontë and Sexuality (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1984), p. 178.
19. Terry Eagleton, Myths of Power: A Marxist Study of the Brontës (London:
Macmillan, 1988), p. 5.
20. Susan Ostrov Weisser, A Craving Vacancy: Women and Sexual Love in the
British Novel, 1740–1880 (New York: New York University Press, 1997), p. 78.
21. Lucy Hughes-Hallett, ‘Introduction’, in Villette (London: Everyman’s
Library, 1992), p. xiii.
22. Ibid.
23. Virtually all critics who have commented on Villette mention Lucy’s
unreliability as a narrator, mostly just in passing as an established fact. However, a
further study of this aspect of the novel shows that there are different opinions about
exactly how Lucy is unreliable and to what extent. Thus, for instance, Lucasta Miller
refers to her as a narrator ‘who frequently conceals vital information from the reader
and offers misleading interpretations of her own character and behaviour’ (Miller, p.
48), while Robert Bernard Martin claims that ‘she is premature, unfair and illogical
in her assessment of others’ (Miller, p. 147). Harriet Björk feels that Lucy is unreli-
able because she is ‘evasive, contradictory, hysterical as a person’ (Harriet Björk,
The Language of Truth: Charlotte Brontë, the Woman Question and the Novel [Lund:
Gleerup, 1974], p. 111). Rachel M. Brownstein simply comments on ‘the perverse-
ness of Lucy the narrator’ (Rachel M. Brownstein, Becoming a Heroine: Reading about
Women in Novels [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984], p. 170) while Pauline Nestor
refers to Lucy’s narration as ‘frequently vague, distorted and unreliable’ (Pauline
Nestor, Women Writers: Charlotte Brontë [London: Macmillan, 1987], p. 85). Lucy
Hughes-Hallett, although claiming that ‘[t]here has seldom been a first-person
narrative which withheld so much from its readers’, nevertheless feels that Lucy is
‘not so much unreliable as evasive’ (Hughes-Hallett, pp. v, vi). Similarly, Suzanne
Keen regards Lucy as a ‘shifty and not-entirely-divulging narrator’ (Suzanne Keen,
Victorian Renovations of the Novel [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998],
p. 109). John Maynard argues, somewhat surprisingly, that Lucy Snowe is actually
a more reliable narrator than Jane Eyre, as she eventually comes to a more complete
understanding of herself than Jane Eyre does: ‘What makes Lucy different from
an unreliable narrator from whom we turn to establish a separate implied author’s
position is that it is to Lucy herself that we turn for eventual clarification of her
own distortions. [. . .] Hence, we look at her finally as a reliable guide to the central
subject of her work, herself ’ (Maynard, pp. 166–167). This is also the line pursued
by Helene Moglen, who claims that Lucy’s apparent contradictions are unconscious,
since ‘[. . .] it is not until she learns to trust her imagination as she must trust her feel-
ings and intuitions that she can become “reliable” as a narrator, “whole” as a woman’
(Moglen, p. 200). Finally, Brenda R. Silver is most radical in her interpretation of
Lucy as a narrator when she ventures that ‘[. . .] it can also be argued that Lucy is
less evasive and even less unreliable than most critics have assumed — that she is,
in fact, a self-consciously reliable narrator of unusual circumstances whose narrative
choices ask her “readers” to perceive her on her own terms’ (Brenda R. Silver, ‘The
Reflecting Reader in Villette’, in The Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development, ed. by
Elizabeth Abel, Marianne Hirsch, and Elizabeth Langland [Hanover & London:
University Press of New England, 1983], p. 91).
24. Charlotte Brontë, Villette (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), p. 243. All
subsequent references will be to this edition and will be given parenthetically within
the text.
25. So, in fact, is Lucy’s claim that on both occasions she wears black with her
pink dress in order to soften or modify the effect. But black decorations would not
do that. On the contrary, they would set off and highlight the pink colour.
26. This was certainly the case at the Cowan Bridge school. Gaskell quotes
the school rule stating that ‘All letters and parcels are inspected by the superinten-
dent’; and adds that ‘this is a very prevalent regulation in all young ladies’ schools,
where I think it is generally understood that the school mistress may exercise this
privilege, although it is certainly unwise in her to insist too frequently upon it’.
Elizabeth Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Brontë (Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1975),
p. 98. It is interesting to note that Gaskell, a woman known for her tact and charm,
does not object to the idea as such, only to antagonizing the pupils by insisting too
frequently on it. She seems to favour a non-confrontational attitude very like that
of Madame Beck.
27. It was also not unusual for headmistresses at the time to treat young female
teachers almost like pupils. Lucasta Miller gives the example of how as late as 1889
‘some young teachers at a girls’ boarding school wanted to read Jane Eyre but were
forbidden to do so by the headmistress until they reached the age of twenty-five’
(Miller, p. 89). Jane Eyre herself goes out of her way to hide the fact that she is writ-
ing and mailing a letter of application for another post while still at Lowood, thus
indicating that there might be some kind of checking of the young teachers’ letters
there too ( Jane Eyre, chapter X).
28. The reviewer of Villette in the Guardian evidently felt that Paulina de
Bassompierre’s correspondence with John Graham Bretton was problematic from
this point of view: ‘In these very volumes Paulina, the perfect character, represented
as a miracle of innocence and delicate perception, corresponds with a young man
clandestinely for months; and Currer Bell narrates it evidently without feeling that
it interferes with the refinement of her heroine’, he complains indignantly (p. 128).
29. They are certainly not worse than Lucy’s methods of ruling, when she is
promoted to be a teacher at the school, which include physical violence and ridicul-
ing the pupils’ efforts.
30. See, for instance, Tony Tanner on how Madame Beck is ‘confronted by the
vicious violence of her daughter Désirée instinctively rebelling in an hysterical way
against the frigid coercions and deprivations of her home’; Tanner, p. 32.
31. This seems to be in accordance with a prevalent motif in many govern-
ess novels of the time, in which the poor, plain, and neglected governess is often
depicted as superior in motherly qualities to her wealthy and worldly employer.
See Cecilia Wadsö Lecaros, The Victorian Governess Novel (Lund: Lund University
Press, 2001), pp. 193–237.
32. It is interesting to compare Lucy’s assessment of Madame Beck’s capaci-
ties with that of Emily Brontë given by Monsieur Heger: ‘She should have been a
man — a great navigator. Her powerful reason would have deduced new spheres of
discovery from the knowledge of the old; and her strong, imperious will would never
have been daunted by opposition or difficulty; never have given way but with life.’
Quoted from Barker, p. 392.
33. Madame Beck and Mrs Bretton, in fact, have many qualities in common:
both are widows who care on their own for their children, and do so well; and both
are intelligent and generous but unsentimental women. Kate Millett calls them ‘two
of the most efficient women one can meet anywhere in fiction’; Kate Millett, Sexual
Politics (London: Sphere Books, 1971), p. 141. Margot Peters also comments on their
similarity: ‘Mrs. Bretton and Madame Beck are two facets of the middle-aged Vic-
torian matron. Both are blooming, efficient, and full of sexual vitality that can find
no market’; Margot Peters, Charlotte Brontë: Style in the Novel (London & Madison,
Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1973), p. 93.
34. Hannah More, Moral Sketches of Prevailing Opinions and Manners, Foreign
and Domestic: with Reflections on Prayer, 3rd edn (London, 1819), pp. 124–125. I am
indebted to Professor Marianne Thormählen for this observation.
35. In strong contrast to Madame Beck’s cheerful generosity, Lucy finds giv-
ing very difficult. On the one occasion when she plans to give a present to another
person (the watch-chain for M. Paul’s birthday which she works so lovingly), she can
hardly make herself actually hand it over.
36. There is one instance when Madame Beck might be suspected of parsi-
moniousness. This is in her payment of Lucy, as the English girl is promoted from
nursery governess to the status of teacher of English. ‘Madame raised my salary’,
says Lucy, adding cattily: ‘but she got thrice the work out of me she had extracted
from Mr Wilson, at half the expense’ (p. 144). However, in this Madame Beck is
simply following the custom of the time, since female teachers were habitually paid
much less than male — and expected to do more work. When Branwell Brontë was
employed as tutor in the Robinson family in 1845, for instance, he was paid exactly
twice as much as his sister Anne who was governess in the same family, in spite of
the fact that she taught the three daughters of the family and he just the one boy
(Barker, p. 466). Unfair as this may seem to us, Charlotte’s salary at this time was
still only half of Anne’s (Barker, p. 351). It would thus seem that Madame Beck
pays Lucy the same salary as her other female teachers, which, considering the fact
that Lucy has no formal qualifications and no teaching experience, is in fact quite
generous.
37. Lucy’s scorn for the painting of the supposedly seductive Cleopatra figure
in the picture gallery is also phrased in terms very similar to those used of Justine
Marie and the girls in the pensionnat: ‘She was, indeed, extremely well fed: very
much butcher’s meat — to say nothing of bread, vegetables and liquids — must she
have consumed to attain that breadth and height, that wealth of muscle, that afflu-
ence of flesh’ (p. 275).
38. See also Lucy’s comment on this occasion on M. Paul’s attitude to money a
page later: ‘I more than suspected in him a lamentable absence of the saving faculty;
he could get, but not keep; he needed a treasurer’ (p. 589, emphasis added).
39. ‘Yes, yes, my good friend; I give you permission from the heart willingly.
Your work in my house has always been admirable, full of zeal and discretion: you
certainly have the right to amuse yourself. Go out as much as you like. As to your
choice of acquaintances, I am happy with it; it is sensible, dignified and praiseworthy’
(translation from the Penguin edition of Villette).
40. The word ‘candour’ is presumably used here in the sense of ‘fairness,
impartiality, justice’ rather than ‘frankness’ (which is not one of Madame Beck’s
qualities). The word also seems to me to carry some of its older meaning of ‘freedom
from malice, favourable disposition, kindliness’. See Oxford English Dictionary, which
also gives Dr Johnson’s definition of the word as ‘sweetness of temper, kindness’.
41. With all her critical acumen Lucy is obviously quite unaware of her own
deficiencies, since she often censures other people for faults that are also her own.
Not only does she thus criticize M. Paul for his habit of spying and for his ‘severe
and suspicious’ (p. 379) attitude, she also complains about Ginevra Fanshawe being
prejudiced against foreigners (pp. 148–149).
42. On anti-Catholicism in Villette, see Marianne Thormählen, The Brontës
and Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 29–36.
43. One shudders at the thought of a turning around of this situation and
how this would be described by Lucy, i.e. a scene in which Madame Beck and M.
Paul (or, indeed, Madame Beck and Dr John) were overheard making fun of Lucy
herself.
44. She jumps to exactly the same conclusion about Madame Beck’s allegedly
mercenary feelings and motives when Ginevra Fanshawe elopes without a note of
explanation in the middle of the night. Since the girl is a minor left in Madame
Beck’s care, it is not surprising that the headmistress is upset and worried. However,
Lucy is certain that this is only because of the possible damage done to the reputa-
tion of the school, ‘Never had I seen Madame Beck so pale or so appalled’, she says,
continuing venomously: ‘Here was a blow struck at her tender part, her weak side;
here was damage done to her interest’ (p. 572).
45. This has been noted by some critics. See for example Margot Peters: ‘Lucy
[. . .] and Madame are alike rather than the opposites they seem. Both are hard-
working, independent, proud, strong-willed personalities. Both hide a passionate
nature under a surface [. . .]’ (p. 91). Brenda R. Silver comments on Lucy’s ‘confused
reaction of admiration and shock at discovering a woman so powerful, so inde-

pendent, so successful, and, in many ways, so like her!’ (p. 106). ‘In almost all the
other characters Lucy Snowe can see facets of her own nature [. . .] most subtly in
Madame Beck, who is Lucy’s most formidable enemy, and yet has qualities of feel-
ing and self-control which Lucy understands and applauds’, says Margaret Smith, in
her ‘Introduction’ in Charlotte Brontë, Villette (Oxford & New York: The World’s
Classics, 1990), p. xvi.
46. We learn very little of the former life of either woman. However, since
Madame Beck obviously belongs to the upper middle classes, and since she is a
widow, it seems reasonable to assume that the death of her husband has made it
necessary for her to support herself, even though she must have started her teaching
career before that. As for Lucy, we see nothing of her home life as a child, but her
relationship to Mrs Bretton as well as the reference to ‘an old servant of our family
— once my nurse’ (p. 103) points to an earlier state of some affluence. Her comment,
‘I know not that I was of a self-reliant or active nature; but self-reliance and exertion
were forced upon me by circumstances’ (p. 95) likewise points to this interpretation
of her situation.
47. Thormählen, p. 35.
48. In fact, this is an argument that Lucy uses in order to make Paulina’s
father accept her engagement to John Graham Bretton: If his daughter does not
marry John Graham, she might marry into the aristocracy of Villette — a possibility
which Count de Bassompierre obviously does not want to contemplate.
49. The question of Lucy Snowe’s, and often, by implication, Charlotte
Brontë’s, sanity has been discussed by a number of readers and critics. To men-
tion but a few, as early as 1920 Lucile Dooley published an article in The American
Journal of Psychology claiming that Charlotte Brontë herself was a neurotic. See
‘Psychoanalysis of Charlotte Brontë as a Type of the Woman of Genius’, American
Journal of Psychology, 31.3 (July 1920). This view has been challenged most force-
fully by John Maynard in Charlotte Brontë and Sexuality (1984), in which he not only
argues convincingly that Lucy’s author was perfectly sane and that her texts are the
products of a conscious artist, but also, less convincingly in my view, claims that the
portrait of Lucy Snowe is that of a woman who, having suffered from repression
and depression, finally reaches full sexual and emotional maturity. In the chapter
on Villette in Charlotte Brontë and Victorian Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1996), Sally Shuttleworth shows how the portrait of Lucy illustrates
Charlotte Brontë’s interest in and knowledge of Victorian psychological theory, and
how she partly adheres to and partly questions established (male) assumptions of the
female psyche.
50. In narratological terminology Lucy is a homodiegetic narrator, i.e. one
who is also a character in the situations and events she recounts.
51. Millett, p. 140.
52. Pauline Nestor, Women Writers: Charlotte Brontë (London: Macmillan,
1987), p. 86.
53. Letter to W. S. Williams, 6 November 1852, in Letters, vol. III, p. 80.
54. Admittedly Ginevra and Paulina are not exactly similar as characters;
Ginevra is much more shallow and flirtatious, Paulina more serious and also more
submissive. But neither seems to develop her full potential because they are both too
anxious to win the approval of the men around them — Ginevra because she wants
economic security, Paulina more for emotional reasons. Paulina’s numerous rewrit-
ings of her letter to John Graham shows that she is just as eager as Ginevra to ‘secure’
her man, only more sophisticated in her means.
55. Kate Millett, while regarding Lucy as a victim of ‘a male-supremacist
society’, nevertheless sees Madame Beck as the villain, since she is a collaborator, ‘a
perpetual policewoman, a virtual forewoman of patriarchal society’ (p. 140). This
seems to me an unfair judgement of a woman who makes the best of her situation
and who is just as much a product of her society as Lucy is.
56. See Christina Crosby on this aspect of Villette: ‘In fact, as her publish-
ers had feared, the novel was read as a record of “subjective misery” that is “almost
intolerably painful”, from which the author “allows us no respite”, an obsessive
representation which is too singular to be “a true presentment of any large portion
of life and experience”. Harriet Martineau forfeited Charlotte Bronte’s friendship
by that review, but her opinion is hardly unique. She is seconded by the Guardian,
which declares that the novel “is too uniformly painful, and too little genial, to be
accepted by the generality as the unmingled truth”. Thackeray, in a private letter, is
more blunt: “That’s a plaguey book that Villette. How clever it is — and how I don’t
like the heroine”.’ Christina Crosby, The Ends of History: Victorians and ‘The Woman
Question (New York & London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 111–112.
57. Lucasta Miller, The Brontë Myth (London: Vintage, 2002).
58. Miller, p. 24.
59. It is significant that the entry on Mme Beck in The Oxford Companion
to the Brontës ends with the words ‘See also Reuter, Mlle Zoraïde’. See The Oxford
Companion to the Brontës, ed. by Christine Alexander and Margaret Smith (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2003).
60. In a letter to Ellen Nussey Charlotte wrote: ‘As to the character of “Lucy
Snowe” my intention from the first was that she should not occupy the pedestal to
which “Jane Eyre” was raised by some injudicious admirers. She is where I meant her
to be, and where no charge of self-laudation can touch her.’ Letter to Ellen Nussey,
22 March 1853, in Letters, vol. III, p. 137. Elizabeth Gaskell, herself a novelist and
aware of the complex psychological mechanisms involved in creative writing, com-
mented shrewdly on Charlotte’s work: ‘I am sure she works off a great deal that is
morbid into her writing, and out of her life’. Letter from Elizabeth Gaskell to Lady
Kay-Shuttleworth, 7 April 1853, in Letters, vol. III, p. 150.
61. See for instance the famous incident at the Roe Head School, retold by
Gaskell, when her friend Mary Taylor told Charlotte that she was ‘very ugly’. Mary
later regretted this comment but was told by Charlotte: ‘You did me a great deal of
good, Polly, so don’t repent of it’, Gaskell, p. 130.
J oan B ellamy
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall:

What Anne Brontë Knew and
What Modern Readers Don’t
I n writing The Tenant of Wildfell Hall Anne Brontë was creating not a
melodrama and love story remote from the realities of her times as some
modern readers may assume but a work which raised serious questions
relating, among others, to religious belief, morality, redemption, conjugal
relations, and injustice. A particularly interesting aspect of The Tenant is the
way in which she places Helen Huntingdon’s tempestuous story in the real
world of the first half of the nineteenth century as it defined, through law
and convention, the status of women.
In the 1840s, when Anne Brontë was writing, married women had no
property rights. If they owned anything it became their husband’s property
unless trusts and settlements were set up as part of a marriage contract; a
resource generally available only to the rich.
Helen’s romantic illusions lead her into a marriage which reduces her
to utter dependence on her husband. In the absence of a legal settlement
all her fortune becomes the property of Arthur to do with it as he thinks
fit. Given Arthur’s profligacy this risked the loss of Helen’s wealth and the
subsequent impoverishment of their son. There were cases in which men
actually bequeathed property, acquired through marriage, to their mistresses,
which, when challenged in the law courts was ruled to be quite lawful.
Of course, Helen’s economic dependence becomes an acute problem, not
in the abstract, but when she finds she can no longer co-habit with Arthur in a
Brontë Studies, Volume 30, Number 3 (November 2005): pp. 255–257. © 2005 The
Bronte Society.
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158 Joan Bellamy
decadent household of heavy drinking, reckless gambling, sexual promiscuity,

and corruption of the child.
Factual accounts of the ways of life of sections of the rich in the first
three or four decades of the nineteenth century confirm the picture Anne
gives in her depiction of Arthur’s way of life. Biographies of the Prince Regent,
his brothers, and prominent politicians such as Charles James Fox and the
Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, are witness to the way of life like that led
by Arthur and his friends. This knowledge would be had by contemporary
readers of The Tenant. The complaints about the coarseness of the novel rested
not so much on a denial of the facts of a situation on which her fiction is
based as on her temerity in bringing them further out into the open.
It becomes clear that Arthur is committing adultery and, moreover,
tries to trap Helen into appearing to do the same. Laws controlling marriage
and divorce still had their roots in ecclesiastical law, treating the genders
unequally. Divorce required complex legal procedures including a private Act
of Parliament, which would be way beyond the means of most people, and the
terms on which husbands and wives could sue for divorce were not identical.
A man could sue on the grounds of his wife’s adultery; women had to establish
not only adultery but other misdemeanours such as bestiality. So in seeking
to trap Helen into committing adultery, or even the possible appearance of it,
Arthur was safe in assuming that she was vulnerable to divorce proceedings
while he, for the same transgression, was not.
Helen both defies her husband and risks conflict with the law on
several counts. Firstly, when she slams the door on the matrimonial bedroom
firmly excluding Arthur. The law gave a husband the right to take action
in the courts for the restitution of his conjugal rights; she could be forced
back into co-habitation and sexual relations. This is one of the reasons that
Helen, having left Arthur, has then to hide away from him. She defies the
law secondly, when she takes their son with her into hiding. Women had no
legal rights in relation to their children; they were the property of the father.
When she runs off with the child, depriving Arthur of access, she is violating
his legal rights. Thirdly, she is in breach of the law by retaining the money
she earns. Anne Brontë endows her heroine with the skills which so many
gentlewomen acquired, that of painter; not because they were intended for
a profession but because it was a desirable accomplishment. However, we
know that Charlotte had considered the possibility of earning money in the
sphere of visual arts and Helen is sufficiently accomplished to earn money by
her work. Helen, in retaining the money she earns is acting illegally because
a wife’s earnings were the property of the husband; they legally belonged to
Arthur. So not only has she stolen his son, she has stolen his money too! In
light of the legal context in which the book is placed, that of the 1820s and
30s, Helen’s actions, which today might appear extreme and melodramatic,
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall 159
can be seen to be a justifiable response to conditions which readers in 1848

could be expected to know about.
Helen’s terrible situation is, of course, resolved, not by legal reforms
but by Arthur’s death, the virtually inevitable outcome of his own profligate
conduct. Helen is ennobled by her return to him, motivated by her deep
religious convictions. Anne Brontë was here expressing her religious beliefs
as well as her conviction of the injustices suffered by women.
To establish the nature of this novel as realist and reformist, we need only
refer to one of the most notorious society scandals of the late 1830s and 40s
which has some points of connection to the Huntingdon story and serves to
illuminate the context of the fiction. Mrs Caroline Norton, granddaughter of
the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan had, at the age of nineteen, married
Ralph Norton, a younger son of the owner of the Norton Conyers estate near
Ripon. She was the centre of a brilliant Whig circle of politicians, writers,
and artists. The Nortons lived above their income; Ralph pressed Carolyn
to use her influence to get him a more lucrative Government post. This she
refused to do. He assaulted her. Reconciliations were always succeeded by
further quarrels and violence with her taking refuge with relatives. During
her absence from their home he removed their three children and placed
them out of reach of their mother and, when she discovered where they were,
refused her any access to them. He was not in breach of the law.
At the same time he charged Lord Melbourne, the then Prime Minister,
with ‘criminal conversation,’ namely adultery, with Caroline. She discovered
that she could not give evidence in the courts to clear her name and support
Melbourne’s denial because she had, as a married woman, no legal existence.
While Melbourne was found not guilty, Caroline remained separated from
her children and without means of subsistence. She was quite a good poet and
composer but she discovered that Ralph had the right to her earnings which
he promptly appropriated. She retaliated with a privately distributed pamphlet
outlining the case and the injustice of the denial of access to the little boys,
one of whom died. The case was taken up by lawyers and some Members of
Parliament. This resulted in the Infant Custody Act of 1838 which, if the
mother was innocent of adultery, allowed her to have custody of children under
the age of seven and access thereafter. Caroline Norton subsequently made a
contribution to the campaign for a Married Women’s Property Act, though
she never identified with the growing women’s rights movement.
So, the novel of the innocent little sister, as Anne has often been seen, is
a tough, realist novel. It has structural flaws but can only be fully appreciated
if the modern reader is equipped with knowledge of the status of women of
Anne’s time.
S usan O strov W eisser
Charlotte Brontë, Jane Austen, and

the Meaning of Love
The text of an Address to the Annual Meeting of the Brontë Society, New York,
December 3, 2005
Charlotte Brontë’s novels were a clear departure from the romantic novels
in vogue in her time, typified in the work of Jane Austen. No longer were
manners, appearance and submissive conformity the ideal. Charlotte believed
in a heroine’s inner strength, her moral integrity, and her intellectual qualities.
The nature of this change is analysed.
I would like to begin with a fact that startled me when I first read of it:
Charlotte Brontë very much disliked Jane Austen and could not quite com-
prehend why she was valued so highly by critics in her time. Until I learned
this, I had grouped the two together as if they had a natural affinity: both
were of primary importance in the British literary tradition as major female
novelists; both were influential in inventing the modern novel; and both
situated their love stories in frames that engaged these narratives with issues
of money, class and social prestige. But, in Charlotte Brontë’s view, their
similarities were not as significant as their differences. I would like to sug-
gest that the radical gap that Charlotte Brontë perceived between herself
and Austen is a key to understanding Charlotte’s own work. In fact, I will
make a larger claim: that her perception of Jane Austen not only reveals
Brontë Studies, Volume 31 ( July 2006): pp. 93–100. © 2006 The Brontë Society.
161
162 Susan Ostrov Weisser
much about Charlotte, but also highlights an important cultural change in

the Victorian definition of romantic love. Furthermore, this change fore-
shadows our contemporary understanding of that malleable term ‘love’, a
shift in meaning to which, we might speculate, Charlotte Brontë substan-
tially contributed herself.
We know about Charlotte’s opinion of Austen from her correspondence
with the respected critic George Henry Lewes, later the companion of
George Eliot. Jane Eyre had received a good review from Lewes and when
he wrote to give Charlotte comments and advice, she took his critique of her
novel seriously. Lewes wanted to underline a fault in Jane Eyre, the moments
of melodrama in it that he called ‘suited to the circulating library’—not a
compliment, and he held out Austen as a model of calm and balanced wisdom
through a more naturalistic style. When he praised Austen, whom Charlotte
had neglected to read, she went to some trouble to obtain Pride and Prejudice.
In her own words to Lewes,
I got the book and studied it. And what did I find? An accurate
daguerrotyped portrait of a commonplace face; a carefully fenced,
highly cultivated garden, with neat borders and delicate flowers; but
no glance of a bright, vivid physiognomy, no open country, no fresh
air, no blue hill, no bonny beck. I should hardly like to live with her
ladies and gentlemen, in their elegant but confined houses. These
observations will probably irritate you, but I shall run the risk.1
For Charlotte, something was lacking, an element she called ‘what throbs
fast, full, though hidden, what the blood rushes through’. 2 This of course
is the heart. Lewes’s praise of Jane Austen’s fiction caused her resentment:
she interpreted his admiration for Austen as a requirement that an author,
to be worthy of esteem, must eliminate the life beneath the surface, the full-
blooded life of experience, including dark experience, while privileging the
carefully worked appearance of social life she saw in Austen.
I am aware that this evaluation of Charlotte’s has a particular irony
in view of the recent opening of the filmed version of Pride and Prejudice,
starring the beautiful Keira Knightley as Elizabeth Bennett. The irony I
refer to lies in the way the film revises and sells the original love story of
Augustan balance and harmony as a romanticized version of the original: one
prominent television ad screams, ‘Romance hasn’t looked this sexy in years!’.
In a recent review of the film, The New Yorker reviewer put it this way: ‘What
has happened is perfectly clear: Jane Austen has been Brontëfied’.
But what exactly does that imply about what Charlotte Brontë, and
the Brontës in general, have contributed to our own definition of love and
romance? And is that modern idea in fact the same as the meaning of
Charlotte Brontë, Jane Austen, and the Meaning of Love 163
romantic love to Charlotte Brontë? The answer to the latter question, I would
say, is not quite. But what I will claim for Charlotte Brontë is that she very
deliberately altered the term ‘love’ as it was understood in her time in a way
that has influenced our society far beyond her own expectations or, perhaps,
beyond her intentions.
It is now a commonplace to say that there is no one definition of romantic
love; that its meaning has been in flux for many centuries. We may begin
with what is often called the beginning of the ideology of love in Western
society. From the Middle Ages until the late eighteenth and beyond, what
we now call ‘romance’ was associated with passion, which is to say intense
sexual longing and erotically charged emotionality. To read about romantic
passion was to enter a world of fantasy, magic and idealized eroticism such
as that expressed by the twelfth century troubadour poets, or found in the
tales of Tristan and Isolde or Lancelot and Guinevere. From the beginning,
an association of anti-social rebelliousness clung to traditional romantic love,
as the medieval poet expressed intense desire for his usually married lady, or
lovers such as Tristan and Lancelot defied the greatest of social prohibitions,
the betrayal of the king, risking all for the greater good of love’s pleasure. The
reaction of the church to a concept of love as close to lust was understandably
strong. In a literary work such as Dante’s late medieval Vita Nuova, in which
the narrator feels true love without desiring more than to hear his beloved’s
greeting, we can see the attempt to detach romantic love from the body in
order to Christianise it. As enlightenment comes to the narrator of the Vita
Nuova after Beatrice’s death, we see romance in the old sense discarded for a
disembodied sense of adoration, as the spirit of the dead beloved shows him
the road to salvation.
By the end of the eighteenth century, when Mary Wollstonecraft and
Jane Austen were writing, the term ‘romance’ was still generally associated
with idealized expectations having little to do with real life. ‘Love’, wrote
Wollstonecraft in 1792, ‘such as the glowing pen of genius has traced, exists
not on earth, or only resides in those exalted, fervid imaginations that have
sketched such dangerous pictures. Dangerous [in that they] take from the
dignity of virtue.’3
At the same time, in the late eighteenth century, there was an increasing
acceptance of marriage based on individual choice in the middle class. A
marriage based on mutual attraction and affection was commonly known as
the ‘love-match’, to distinguish it from the pragmatic exchange of women’s
attractiveness and domestic labour for the man’s economic provision and social
power that was the usual configuration of matrimony. Both Wollstonecraft
and Austen favoured love as the basis for marriage, as opposed to marrying
for money and social prestige, but their definition of love is opposed to
‘romantic love’, as Wollstonecraft defines it above. Though Wollstonecraft was
a radical and Jane Austen arguably conservative in many ways, both devalued
‘romantic’ views of love as flighty, inimical to the importance of rationality
and judgment, companionship, sensible affection and admiration for good
character in marriage. In Pride and Prejudice, the union of Lydia and Wickham
represents selfish lust and the marriage of Elizabeth’s friend Charlotte to the
odious Mr. Collins is one that exposes the limitations of the purely pragmatic
marriage with no real affection at all. In between these stands a relatively new
concept of love, one that is defined by a growth into mature self-development
as well as sober recognition of and esteem for the other. In the view of both
Wollstonecraft and Austen, mutual respect and valuing of character enables
women to maintain greater dignity and worth in the social arrangement of
courtship and marriage that still ultimately determines their lives.
The Romantic era, as it appeared in Britain in the late eighteenth to early
nineteenth century following its philosophical and literary origins in Europe,
provided an important alternative definition of romance, entangling romantic
love with sexual desire, intense and all-consuming feeling, and longing for a
transcendent ideal, as Goethe had illustrated in the wildly popular tale, The
Sorrows of Young Werther. As admirers of the medieval, the Romantics once
again restored to love a deep sense of mystery and the sublime, an admiration
for wildness and rule-breaking in passion. Romanticism raised the value of
emotion for its own sake, the deeper and more intense the better, explored
through plumbing psychological depth and expressed through dreams and
fantasy. As opposed to the moderation, balance and calm of rational affection,
the sorrow and alienation of unrequited and forbidden love symbolized the
rejection of stultifying convention for the sake of primal emotion. Young
Werther, for example, committed suicide at the end of the German novel for
love of an unattainable married woman.
Jane Austen’s own ambivalence about this new and rebellious movement
is embodied in the character of Benwick in Persuasion, where, under the
influence of Romantic reading, he sighs, reads verses aloud all day and
cultivates ‘a melancholy air’, a practice she obviously finds amusingly absurd
and pretentious. But we know that Charlotte Brontë was an avid reader of
the British Romantic poets, including Byron, an icon of masculine wildness
and sexual experience. It is not difficult to trace much of Charlotte’s imagery
to the Romantic sense of harmony in man and nature, their high valuation
of imagination and imaginative freedom, and their admiration for liberty and
equality rather than authoritarianism. It is generally agreed that the Brontë
sisters were not only interested in and influenced by the Romantic movement,
but represent a continuation of it in some form.
In 1840s Britain, when Charlotte Brontë began writing Jane Eyre, there
were various other traditions concerning romance, literary and popular, on
which she was able to draw, either as model or in protest; each in its way
contributing to her understanding and representation of romantic love:
1. Popular advice books in the Victorian age, often aimed at women,
attempted to enforce the necessity to look to worthiness of character in mar-
riage choice as opposed to matters of feeling. As one mid-century clergyman
intoned, ‘There are ideas, romantic, impassioned, immodest, derived from
impure novels and impurer fancies, which you must prayerfully exclude from
the chambers of your soul . . . Learn that your affections are under your
own control; that pure affection is founded upon esteem . . . restrain your
affections, therefore, with vigor’. This may sound like a version of eighteenth
century rational love, but in fact there is a great difference. Because early
Victorian Britain was more explicitly focused on religious matters than was
the freethinker Mary Wollstonecraft or Jane Austen for that matter, this
emphasis on conduct and character as the basis for love in marriage was
strongly associated with Christian spirituality: ‘Marriage, properly viewed’,
this author writes,
is a union of kindred minds, a blending of two souls in mutual, holy

affection. Its physical aspects, pure and necessary as they are, are
its lowest and least to be desired ones; indeed, they derive all their
sanctity from the spiritual affinity existing between the parties.4
Thus, mainstream advice literature emphasized the distinction between pas-

sionate love, whose basis is lust, essentially sinful and selfish, and romantic
love as the spiritualization of sexuality, ennobling the lovers through serving
God’s purposes in holy matrimony. This is clearly a descendant of Dante’s
idea, though not so extreme, since the body and sexual relations are folded
into the legitimizing arena of marriage.
2. Popular literary depictions of courtship, of which Coventry Patmore’s

widely read narrative poem ‘The Angel in the House’ (1854–62) might
stand as a particularly useful example. Patmore’s poem was so well known
that the title later came to stand for the very idea of woman’s domestic role in
Victorian culture; the phrase was used by Virginia Woolf when she famously
wrote, ‘In those days every house had its Angel’, who was ‘immensely
charming’, ‘utterly unselfish’, ‘sacrificed herself daily’, ‘never had a mind
or wish of her own’, and above all, was ‘pure’.5 Virginia Woolf expressed a
strong desire to ‘kill’ her, and when we read the Patmore poem, it is easy to
see why. Here is the description of the beloved:
Her disposition is devout

Her countenance angelical . . .
How amiable and innocent

Her pleasure in her power to charm. . . .
Her beauty is the genial thought
Which makes the sunshine bright . . .
. . . She grows
More infantine, auroral, mild,
And still the more she lives and knows
The lovelier she’s expressed a child.
The pervasive medium of magazine fiction featured a parade of virtuous,

modest, sweet, demure and submissive girls, always depicted as beautiful
in that particularly virtuous, modest, sweet and demure way, who won the
hearts of gallant, handsome, well-placed young men.
3. Popular tales of cross-class seduction of a virtuous young woman by an

immoral aristocratic libertine, who tries to take advantage of her or succeeds
in the seduction and then abandons her. The extraordinarily popular Pamela,
an eighteenth century novel by Samuel Richardson, was the first of its kind
to achieve wide recognition, but the genre continued until mid-century to be
popular with the working class. A subgenre in the early nineteenth century
is the cautionary tale of the fallen woman, who is laid low by poverty and
sexual exploitation.
4. The popular Gothic literary tradition, a subgenre of Romanticism, which

favoured distressed and beset heroines amidst wild and picturesque land-
scapes or gloomy, macabre castles, haunted mansions, and supernatural,
scary doings inspiring horror and thrills.
I believe we can recognize suggestions of all these in the works of Charlotte

Brontë, generally. But I am going to focus now, particularly, on Jane Eyre,
because I would say that this novel has, perhaps more than others by
Charlotte or any other author, especially defined romantic love through
a paradigmatic story that has lasted into our contemporary age. That is,
as the new filmed version of Pride and Prejudice and its reviews imply, we
have come to accept the Romantic idea of feeling charged with sexual pas-
sion as the very basis for romantic love, but we do not stop there. Instead,
we have united this view of romance, as Charlotte does, with the domestic
virtues, affectionate intimacy and support, and suitability of temperament
that Austen identified as the proper basis for marriage. This improbable
union of romantic passion and domestic relationship is now the dominant
paradigm. Thus, the necessity for revising Austen, for ‘Brontëfying’ her:
the Hollywood version must be the ‘Brontëfied’ vision of romantic love to
sell widely, not the Austenian version, which is not as comprehensible to a

modern audience.
To see how Charlotte constructed her own interpretation of romance,
we may look at the way in which she synthesized some of the elements
above. Taking the last of my list first, the Gothic tradition appears in Jane
Eyre quite seriously, though it is parodied in Villette. It’s fair to ask what
Charlotte’s interest in it was. The wildness of the landscape, the field of
thorns and knotted trees, and the thrilling risks of the mansion haunted
by the mad and apparition-like Bertha, recall the elements of the fantastic
in Charlotte Brontë’s youthful fantasies, pursued over many years with her
siblings. Her first love stories were set in Glasstown and Angria, the lands
of dreams she associated with a life of melodrama and passion outside the
restrictive confines of the life of a minister’s daughter.
For Jane Eyre, Charlotte took fundamentals of this emotional landscape
and integrated into it the popular story of the lustful aristocrat, who has a shady
past and selfishly seduces, or tries to seduce, the poor but virtuous maiden. In
Samuel Richardson’s version of the seduction tale, the maidservant Pamela
eventually marries the master, thus ‘reforming the rake’ and rising to a social
class she sincerely never attempted to reach. In Pamela and Richardson’s great
tragic novel Clarissa, the theme of sexual seduction appears in a melodrama in
which the mere thrill of action is transformed by a moral perspective, a model
Charlotte Brontë adapted to her own purposes, as Rochester is transformed
melodramatically and morally.
We know that Charlotte also read and reacted to the magazine fiction
that was increasingly available with the spread of print media in the Victorian
age. Mrs. Gaskell’s famous story has become literary history: during the period
when the Brontë sisters were composing their first novels, Charlotte is said to
have told Emily and Anne, ‘I will prove to you that you are wrong; I will show
you a heroine as plain and as small as myself, who shall be as interesting as any
of yours’.6 It has often been remarked, too, that Rochester is not the young,
handsome, charmingly elegant and well-mannered hero of these fictions, and
still less is Jane Eyre, who though young, is not anything like the lovely, sweet,
demure and angelic maiden.
Why did subverting the literary convention appeal so much to Charlotte
that she would take this risk of alienating her would-be publishers and readers?
It is all too easy to give a psychological motive based on Elizabeth Gaskell’s
biography, but Jane’s low status and lack of beauty are integral to Charlotte’s
literary vision of romance as well. In Jane Eyre, Charlotte dramatically reveals
the power structure which placed little value on children, the poor and women
in Victorian society: Jane suffers from being all three, a poor and female child
at the beginning, a poor female adult till just before the end. It seems fair,
then, to view this rebellious gesture, Charlotte’s insistence on a plain heroine,
as her comment on Victorian notions of romance. I would say this gesture

marks her recognition of romantic love as it was defined in her society as an
idealized mask for a social game in which female beauty is exchanged for the
attention of men and the reward of marriage, with its conferral of economic
security and prestige on the woman.
Instead, Charlotte substitutes an alternative view of romance, which is
derived from the Romantics. In fact, she insists on it: romantic love entails
intense feeling, intimations of erotic pleasure, uncontrollable longing even in
the face of almost certain rejection. In the lovers and in the landscape of Jane
Eyre, we can apprehend the wildness, the appreciation of the imagination and
of the power of the dream that is her inheritance from the Romantic era. Just
as important, we may see the significance of the inner landscape as the lovers
reveal themselves to each other, share souls and confidences and tastes, across
a barrier that seems at the time insurmountable. He ‘dives into her eyes’, she
is ‘his sympathy’, she is ‘akin’ to him, his ‘diary’, ‘assimilated to him’, and in
sum, ‘his second self ’.7
But Charlotte Brontë is also a moralist, a sincere and devout Christian
moralist. Under the pressure of necessity, she produces a framework in which
the Gothic elements are displaced onto the story of a lustful and intemperate
character, Bertha, as the elements of conventional romance are critiqued
and disposed of in the subplot of the triumph of Jane over Blanche Ingram.
She anchors the romanticism, as well as these elements, in a plot through
which Jane is allowed to manifest and prove a spiritual love for Rochester
by rejecting the choice of immoral passion. From the beginning of their love
relation, Rochester has looked to Jane to ‘save’ him, calling her his ‘angel’. In
this, we can see the strong influence of the Victorian view of marital love
as spiritualized, incorporating and controlling the Romantic view of the
essential nature of passion to life.
Yet the novel does not end there, and in the last phase, the character of
St. John Rivers reverses the trajectory of the novel toward an unexpected, if
notably ambivalent, critique of the Christian rejection of sexual passion as
foundational for romantic love. In a way, St. John represents the passionless
Angel in the House, restraining his feelings as the advice-giving Victorian
clergyman advised. Though attracted to his Christian self-sacrifice and moral
vision, ultimately Jane is horrified at his view of sexuality: ‘As his wife’, she
says, ‘always restrained, always checked, forced to keep the fire of my nature
continually low, to compel it to burn inwardly and never utter a cry, though
the imprisoned flame consumed . . . this would be unendurable’ (p. 472). In
the end, she rejects him, as we know, crying, ‘I scorn your idea of love, I scorn
the counterfeit sentiment you offer’ (p. 473, my italics). Though Jane mastered
her own actions when loving Rochester was immoral, it is fundamental to her
romantic vision that passionate feeling itself is uncontrollable.
Much has been said about the conclusion of Jane Eyre in which Rochester,
the former master, is reduced to a state of helpless need, leaning on Jane, his
nurse and beloved. Some have seen Rochester’s mutilation of hand and eye
as a reduction of the threatening element of sexuality; some as a religious
punishment for his adulterous desire for Jane; and some as a proto-feminist
wish-fulfillment, a fantasy of equalization between the soon-to-be married
lovers achieved through a plot device. Perhaps, in the way of complex works
of the imagination, it is all three.
Charlotte Brontë was fascinated with relations of power; powerlessness
and estrangement, a sense of displacement from being at home, is the
condition for falling in love, especially for women in her novels. But sexual
love is represented as both liberation and oppression. Jane Eyre is powerless
and becomes ensnared in helpless love for her master, for example, but she also
masters her dominating employer, then goes on to master her own feelings,
including anger and desire. Lacking bodily self, small, thin and plain, the
heroine’s strength is her spirit and desire.
The meaning of romance to Charlotte Brontë, then, is a complex one,
combining disparate and indeed contradictory elements of her personal
psychology, her private imaginative life, her religious belief, her reading of
popular and Romantic literature, and her rebellion against convention.
Why, one might ask, did Bronte put so much effort, as her character Jane
directs so much energy, into altering the usual definition of romantic love,
especially in view of the way it left the author vulnerable to harsh criticism?
Again, one might offer a psychological explanation regarding her desire to
conciliate opposing elements in conflict: her wish to legitimize sexual passion
and incorporate it into romance along with her fearful consciousness of its
prohibition. But psychoanalytic analyses of long-dead people are not my
business; instead, I would note that one of Charlotte’s concerns is social, a
rebellious desire to protest the ‘keeping down’ of women, including their
sexual repression, without sacrificing her moral concern that this passionate
element of love be sanctified in the eyes of God.
To conclude, I would like to go back to a consideration of the effect
of Brontëan romance on the new film version of Pride and Prejudice. I have
said that Charlotte Bronte, along with her sister Emily, has influenced our
contemporary ideas of romantic love so that we now expect elements of
uncontrollable feeling, intense passion and the drama of emotion to define
romance, integrating these features with courtship and marriage. But,
though the film of Pride and Prejudice is, in the phrase of The New Yorker
reviewer, ‘Brontë-fied’, it is also modern in a very particular way that directly
contradicts and undermines one of Charlotte’s purposes. That is, in the
Austen novel, the heroine Elizabeth Bennet is not the most beautiful girl
in the town, the room, or even her family, though very attractive. Instead,
the filmed version features an actress who frequently attracts the epithet
‘gorgeous’, with the result that in the movie the heroine outshines her sister
Jane, who is the beauty of the family in the novel. What does this alteration
tell us about the way we see romantic love now?
I would say that our celebrity culture, in which a movie can’t sell itself
to an audience unless it gives star billing to a young, fabulously beautiful
actress with sexy looks, embodies the regressive element in the conventional
way of looking at women that Charlotte Brontë herself consciously tried to
protest through ‘plain’ heroines like Jane Eyre and Lucy Snowe. In the now-
conventional popular ideology of romance, we remember Charlotte’s attempt to
make sexuality meaningful, but we could care less about her desire to question
and revise the system of value that makes women worthy of love only as long
as they are the Victorian equivalent of movie stars. This, I would suggest, is the
greatest irony of all in considering Charlotte’s relation to past and future in
defining love.
No t e s
1. Letter from Charlotte Brontë to G. H. Lewes, 12 January 1848.
2. Letter from Charlotte Brontë to W. S. Williams, 12 April 1850.
3. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Penguin,
1975, reprinted 1992, p. 170.
4. Daniel Wise, The Young Lady’s Counsellor; or, Outlines and Illustrations of the
Sphere, the Duties, and the Dangers of Young Women, New York: Carlton & Phillips,
1855, pp. 234–235.
5. Virginia Woolf, ‘Professions for Women’ in The Death of the Moth and Other
Essays (1942). Chatto & Windus, 1970.
6. Elizabeth C. Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857), Introduction by
Winifred Gérin. New York: Dutton, 1971, p. 215.
7. All quotations are from the Barnes and Noble Classics edition, edited with
Introduction and Notes by Susan Ostrov Weisser, New York: Barnes and Noble,
2003.
A nne L ongmuir
Anne Lister and Lesbian Desire in

Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley
I n May 2003, the British network television station, Channel 4, screened

a documentary entitled ‘Queer as 18th Century Folk’ as part of its Georgian
Underworld series. It offered a revisionist history of homosexuality in
the eighteenth (and nineteenth) centuries that tacitly challenged Michel
Foucault’s assertion that characterization in psychiatric, psychological
and medical discourse constituted the modern homosexual in the late-
nineteenth-century.1 Among the stories told was that of Anne Lister
(1791–1840), a nineteenth-century Yorkshire landowner, whose extensive
diary reveals numerous affairs with women, as well as her ‘marriage’ to the
shy, nervous Ann Walker, a local heiress, in 1834. Watching this docu-
mentary, I was struck immediately by the similarities between the story of
Anne Lister, and Charlotte Brontë’s novel, Shirley (1849). Charlotte’s novel
depicts a Yorkshire heiress and landowner who affects, a little like Anne
Lister, a masculine identity. Furthermore, like Anne Lister, Charlotte’s
heroine has an economic and political standing normally denied to women
in the nineteenth century. And, just as Lister sought a life partner in
Ann Walker, so Shirley humours the quiet, feminine Caroline Helstone,
functioning as her ‘alternative “mate”’. 2 A little research revealed, more
startlingly, that the connections between Charlotte Brontë’s novel and the
life of Anne Lister are more than just in subject matter: during the winter
Brontë Studies, Volume 31, Number 2 (July 2006): pp. 146–155. © 2006 The Bronte
Society.
171
172 Anne Longmuir
of 1838–39, Charlotte’s sister, Emily, lived within a mile of Anne Lister.

Despite the proximity of Emily Brontë to Anne Lister in 1838–39 and the
similarity between Anne Lister’s life and Charlotte Brontë’s plot, neither
Channel 4’s filmmakers nor literary critics have explored the connection
between Charlotte’s novel and Anne Lister. This article seeks to rectify this
oversight by exploring the parallels between Charlotte’s novel and Anne
Lister’s life, and by examining the significance of this coincidence to our
reading of Shirley.
Relatively little is known about Emily Brontë’s time at Elizabeth
Patchett’s Law Hill School, principally because Patchett was so offended by
the reprinting of Charlotte Brontë’s description of life at Law Hill as ‘hard
labour’ and ‘slavery’ in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Brontë that she
refused to give any information about Emily’s experiences at Law Hill during
her lifetime.3 However, critics have established that Emily arrived at Law Hill
in September 1838, while Anne Lister was visiting the Pyrenees with Ann
Walker. Emily’s date of departure is also uncertain, though it seems likely
to have been in March or early April 1839, around four months after Lister
returned to Shibden Hall in November 1838.4,5
Unsurprisingly, Lister’s proximity to Emily Brontë in the winter of
1838–39 has become the subject of some speculation. As Jill Liddington
writes: ‘Biographers since Winifred Gerin (1971) have become increasingly
fascinated by Law Hill’s closeness to Shibden and by any link between
Elizabeth Patchett and Anne Lister’.6 Liddington cites Maureen Peters’s
romantic novel about Emily Brontë’s life, Child of Earth (1999), which
includes a scene in which Elizabeth Patchett invites Emily to a musical soirée
given by Anne Lister, and Glyn Hughes’s novel, Brontë (1996), in which
Emily encounters Anne Lister and Ann Walker kissing. But unfortunately
for Glynn Hughes and Maureen Peters, there is no reference to Emily
Brontë, Elizabeth Patchett or Law Hill in Anne Lister’s diaries during the
period from November 1838 to March 1839.7,8 Jill Liddington argues that
the absence of any reference is conclusive proof that Anne and Emily did not
know each other socially: ‘Given the almost obsessive video-camera detail of
the daily journals 1838–39, we can emphatically assert: there was not a single
meeting of Anne Lister with Emily Brontë during her Law Hill months’.9
But Liddington also reminds us that the social mores of the period mean
any kind of friendship or relationship between the women was unlikely in
any case: ‘Would Anne Lister have known Emily Brontë? The answer is a
categoric ‘No’: no more than Mrs Ingham ‘knew’ Anne Brontë, or Blanche
Ingram ‘knew’ Jane Eyre’.10
But just as Elliot Vanskike argues in his article ‘Consistent
Inconsistencies: The Transvestite Actress Madame Vestris and Charlotte
Brontë’s Shirley’, that ‘[w]hile it seems all but impossible to prove that Brontë
Anne Lister and Lesbian Desire in Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley 173
knew of Vestris, it is equally implausible to assert that she did not know of
her’, so it is equally implausible that Emily Brontë did not know of Anne
Lister.11 Law Hill is less than a mile from Shibden Hall and, according to
Edward Chitham, Shibden Hall can be seen from the top windows at Law
Hill.12 Phyllis Bentley even argued that Law Hill and Shibden Hall inspired
Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange in Wuthering Heights (1847).13
Anne Lister and Elizabeth Patchett were also acquaintances.14,15 Even Jill
Liddington acknowledges that despite a lack of ‘friendship’ between Anne
Lister and Emily Brontë, Emily would have seen Lister and Ann Walker
around the Shibden estate and that she ‘would surely puzzle over the tensely
transgressive nature of their relationship’.16
Anne Lister was a conspicuous figure, who kept her hair short and
wore all black bodices, which resembled men’s coats.17 Her masculinity was
apparent to locals, who nicknamed her ‘Gentleman Jack’, and her predilection
for women was also an open secret.18 A mocking advertisement for a husband
for Lister appeared in the Leeds Mercury,19 while a mob was rumoured to
have burned effigies of Lister and Walker in the spring of 1836.20 It seems
likely therefore that Emily would have heard tales of Anne Lister from her
neighbours at Law Hill. Indeed, Jill Liddington even argues that ‘bitter
inheritance disputes among the extended Walker–Priestly–Lister families’
inspired Wuthering Heights, as much as the more often cited tale of Jack
Sharp. Liddington believes these stories have not been given the same
standing as that of Jack Sharp ‘because the Anne Walker “marriage” to Anne
Lister was deliberately erased, and so the Walker family history suppressed’.21
Here Liddington makes an important claim for the impact of Anne Lister
on Brontë studies, arguing that the taboo nature of Anne Lister’s relationship
with Ann Walker has had a material impact on critical understanding of the
sources of Wuthering Heights.
This article is indebted to the work of Jill Liddington and others,
who have extensively explored the connection between Emily Brontë and
Anne Lister. However, no literary critic or historian has yet examined the
connection between Anne Lister and Charlotte Brontë. This omission is
despite the striking similarities between Shirley and Anne Lister’s story, and
the likelihood that Charlotte Brontë also knew of Anne Lister. This article is
an attempt to rectify this oversight.
§
Anne Lister must have been a conspicuous and intriguing figure for any young
woman: she had achieved a personal and economic independence enjoyed by
few women in the nineteenth century, and had travelled extensively in Europe.
What is more, Charlotte may have recognised something of her relationship
with Ellen Nussey in Anne Lister’s relationship with Ann Walker. Charlotte
174 Anne Longmuir
and Ellen were extremely close and once dreamt of living together themselves:
‘Ellen, I wish I could live with you always. I begin to cling to you more fondly
than ever I did. If we had but a cottage and a competency of our own, I do
think we might live and love on till Death without being dependent on any
third person for happiness’.22 Elaine Miller even claims Charlotte and Ellen’s
relationship was a lesbian relationship, pointing to the passion of their letters,
and to Arthur Nicholls’ apparent jealousy of Nussey. Furthermore, Lister
would surely have intrigued Charlotte, given the fascination with cross-
dressing and androgyny which is apparent throughout her fiction from
Rochester’s gypsy woman disguise in Jane Eyre (1847) to Lucy Snowe’s perfor-
mance of the male lead in the school play in Villette (1853).
The thematic similarities between Lister’s life and Shirley are immediately
apparent. Shirley Keeldar and Anne Lister are both local landowners who
adopt masculine personas to bolster their power. Shirley refers to herself as
‘Captain Keeldar’, and explicitly adopts a male identity when dealing with
local businessmen and clergy:
Business! Really the word makes me conscious I am indeed no lon-

ger a girl, but quite a woman and something more. I am an esquire:
Shirley Keeldar, Esquire ought to be my style and title. They gave
me a man’s name; I hold a man’s position: it is enough to inspire me
with a touch of manhood; and when I see such people as that stately
Anglo-Belgian — that Gerard Moore before me, gravely talking to
me of business, really I feel quite gentlemanlike.23
Similarly, Anne Lister discovered that her sexual identity had some busi-
ness advantages. As Jill Liddington writes: ‘Her lesbianism also undoubtedly
made a difference; other landowners must have guessed she was there to stay
and so had to be taken more seriously’.24 Both women inherit their property
‘for lack of male heirs’.25 And, as the lack of male heirs prompts Shirley’s
parents to give her ‘the same masculine family cognomen they would have
bestowed on a boy, if with a boy they had been blessed’, 26 so Anne Lister
discovered that adopting a masculine identity helped persuade her uncle to
leave Shibden Hall to her, as he knew Lister would never fall into marriage
with an unscrupulous fortune hunter.27 Shirley and Lister are also considered
masculine by other men of their acquaintance. The Rev. Helstone assigns the
protective power of the male to Shirley, asking her ‘as a gentleman—the first
gentleman in Briarfield [. . .] to [. . .] be master of the Rectory, and guard-
ian of your niece and maids while you are away?’,28 while an acquaintance of
Anne Lister, Mr Lally, ascribes a masculine sexual predator quality to her:
‘Mr Lally had been visiting at Moreton last September & said he would as
soon turn a man loose in his house as me’.29
Both women woo a female companion (or in Lister’s case, several female
companions). Each takes on a masculine role in such relationships. Shirley
explicitly adopts the role of an eligible bachelor when she arrives at Briarfield,
bemoaning the fact that ‘If she had had the bliss to be really Shirley Keeldar,
Esq., Lord of the Manor of Briarfield, there was not a single fair one in this
and the two neighbouring parishes, whom she should have felt disposed to
request to become Mrs Keeldar, lady of the manor’.30 When she first meets
Caroline Helstone she courts her as a gentleman, presenting her with flowers
‘in the attitude and with something of the aspect of a grave but gallant little
cavalier’.31 Lister also saw her relationships through a heterosexual paradigm,
believing that ‘two Jacks do not go together’.32 She always characterized herself
as male, often fantasizing she had a penis,33 and even refusing one lover’s offer
of sexual release on the grounds that ‘This is womanizing me too much’.34 Both
Anne Lister and Shirley Keeldar also reject educated or bluestocking women in
favour of what they perceive as more feminine companions. Lister states: ‘I am
not an admirer of learned ladies. They are not the sweet, interesting creatures I
should love’,35 while Shirley argues that ‘hard labour and learned professions,
they say, make women masculine, coarse, unwomanly’.36 Unsurprisingly, each
woman’s object of affection is a weaker, more feminine figure.
Both Caroline Helstone and Ann Walker exhibit more fragile
personalities than their ‘mates’. Crucially it is their acceptance of feminine
roles that causes both to suffer physically and mentally. Ann Walker endured
for many years what Elizabeth Foyster calls ‘the fashionable female afflictions
of nervousness and hysteria’,37 which seemed to stem in part at least from her
(socially expected) lack of occupation or purpose. As Dr Belcombe suggested
to his sister Marianna: ‘Is she une malade imaginaire? Because Steph says, in
speaking of her to me, “If Miss Walker was poor she would probably not be
sick”’.38 Caroline Helstone also feels her lack of occupation keenly. She frets:
‘What was I created for, I wonder? Where is my place in the world?’.39 But,
like Ann Walker, Caroline’s class position will not allow her to find purpose
through work. Her uncle declares: ‘While I live, you shall not turn out as a
governess, Caroline. I will not have it said that my niece is a governess’.40 As an
unmarried genteel young woman Caroline is condemned to a life of enforced
idleness. Caroline is disturbed by her lack of economic independence, as her
conversation with Robert reveals:
‘I am making no money–earning nothing.’

‘You come to the point, Lina; you too, then, wish to make
money?’
‘I do: I should like an occupation; and if I were a boy, it would
not be so difficult to find one. I see such an easy, pleasant way of
learning a business, and making my way in life.’41
176 Anne Longmuir
Just as Walker repeatedly suffered from melancholy, so Caroline’s depres-

sion at her situation precipitates a life-threatening illness in Shirley: ‘Winter
seemed conquering her spring: the mind’s soil and its treasures were freez-
ing gradually to barren stagnation’.42 But importantly, while Charlotte
associates Caroline’s malaise with sterility, she does not see its cure in
heterosexual relations.
The problem of lack of occupation for middle and upper-class single
women in Victorian society, what Charlotte Brontë calls ‘the question which
most old maids are puzzled to solve’,43 is one of the central issues of Shirley. In
Chapter 10, entitled ‘Old Maids’, Caroline visits Miss Mann and Miss Ainley
determined to discover what role these spinsters have carved for themselves.
But even the most positive model, Miss Ainley, lives a life of stultifying self-
sacrifice, prompting Caroline to ask: ‘Is this enough? Is it to live? Is there
not a terrible hollowness, mockery, want, craving, in that existence which is
given away to others, for want of something of your own to bestow it on?
I suspect there is. Does virtue lie in abnegation of the self?’44 Significantly,
Charlotte makes a plea to fathers to educate their daughters: ‘Keep your girls’
minds narrow and fettered—they will still be a plague and a care, sometimes
a disgrace to you: cultivate them—give them scope and work—they will be
your gayest companions in health; your tenderest nurses in sickness; your
most faithful prop in age’.45 Ann Walker’s lack of intellectual resources
certainly seems to have contributed to her depression, causing Anne Lister
to encourage her to adopt a daily regime of French, drawing and reading.46
But Charlotte does not see the solution to the problem of single women lying
solely in education; she also promotes female relationships.
Charlotte Brontë suggests for much of Shirley that male–female
relationships are unsuccessful and doomed to failure. The book contains
repeated warnings and diatribes against marriage.47 Rather than promoting
heterosexuality, Charlotte instead, as Jin-Ok Kim argues, ‘comes quite close
to suggesting that the relation of women with other women is the most
natural one’.48 While her relationship with Robert Moore brings pain and
disappointment, Caroline’s relationship with Shirley is a source of pleasure
and comfort: ‘Love hurts us so, Shirley: it is so tormenting, so racking, and
it burns away our strength with its flame; in affection is no pain and no fire,
only sustenance and balm. I am supported and soothed when you—that is,
you only—are near, Shirley’.49 Caroline points to the unique nature of her
relationship with Shirley, as if they and not Caroline and Robert are soul
mates. Furthermore, as Anne Lister recognised the marriage of her lover,
Marianna Lawton, as ‘legal prostitution’,50 so Charlotte recognises that many
heterosexual marriages are prompted by economic needs rather than feeling
or affection: ‘what is worst of all, reduced to strive, by scarce modest coquetry
and debasing artifice, to gain that position and consideration by marriage,
which to celibacy is denied’.51 In Shirley and Anne Lister’s world, it seems,

true emotional closeness is possible only between women.
Indeed, Charlotte Brontë and Anne Lister repeatedly depict female
relations as the most natural. Anne Lister described her attraction to women
as ‘all nature’,52 while she reported proudly in her diary: ‘Speaking of my
oddity, Mrs Priestley said she always told people I was natural, but she
thought that nature was in an odd freak when she made me’.53 When Anne’s
lover Marianna Belcombe objects to their relationship on the grounds of the
‘horror she had to anything unnatural’,54 Anne responds by arguing that her
‘conduct & feelings being surely natural to me inasmuch as they were not
taught, not fictitious, but instinctive’.55
Similarly, Caroline and Shirley’s relationship is repeatedly associated with
nature. When planning a trip alone to Nunnwood, Caroline and Shirley discuss
whether to invite any gentlemen. They conclude that in the presence of men:
‘We forget Nature, imprimis.’

‘And then Nature forgets us; covers her vast, calm brow with a dim
veil, conceals her face, and withdraws the peaceful joy with which,
if we had been content to worship her only, she would have filled
our hearts.’56
In other words, Caroline and Shirley argue that female relationships enjoy an
affinity with nature that is impossible in the presence of men. Furthermore,
as the nunnery that lies at the bottom of the dell indicates, Charlotte also
presents the natural environment of Nunnwood as an exclusively female
space. But rather than suggesting celibacy, Nunnwood represents a rejec-
tion of heterosexuality, in favour of erotic relations between women. The
description of the wood abounds with suggestions of female sexuality and
fertility, which offer a direct antidote to the ‘barren stagnation’ of Caroline’s
depression.57 As Caroline tells Shirley:
‘That break is a dell; a deep, hollow cup, lined with turf as green
and short as the sod of this Common [. . .] I know where the
wild strawberries abound; I know certain lonely, quite untrodden
glades, carpeted with strange mosses [. . .] Miss Keeldar, I could
guide you’.58
Not only are female relationships associated with nature in Shirley therefore,
there is also a suggestion that these relationships are—paradoxically—more
‘fertile’ than heterosexual ones.
Besides their adoption of masculine personas, and their wooing of a
more feminine, fragile partner, both Lister and Shirley reinterpret masculine
178 Anne Longmuir
texts, as they attempt to revise patriarchal discourse. Shirley challenges male

narratives, and especially male depictions of women:
If men could see us as we really are, they would be a little amazed;

but the cleverest, the acutest men are often under an illusion about
women: they do not read them in a true light: they misapprehend
them, both for good and evil: their good woman is a queer thing,
half doll, half angel; their bad woman almost always a fiend. Then
to hear them fall into ecstasies with each other’s creations, wor-
shipping the heroine of such a poem — novel — drama, think-
ing it fine — divine! Fine and divine it may be, but often quite
artificial — false as the rose in my best bonnet there. If I spoke
all I think on this point; if I gave my real opinion of some first-
rate female characters in first rate works, where should I be? Dead
under a cairn of avenging stones in half an hour.59
Shirley rejects the virgin/whore dichotomy that dominates masculine depic-

tions, and argues that no male text can accurately represent women. Lister
was similarly attuned to depictions of women, and she read voraciously,
hunting for any signs of lesbian desire. But as Shirley finds male depic-
tions of women to be inaccurate, so Lister had difficulty recognising herself
in male texts. As Anna Clark writes: ‘References to lesbianism were few,
oblique, and usually scornful. Anne therefore had to summon all her consid-
erable scholarly and monetary resources to track down rare editions and read
in French and Latin to find any references to sexuality between women’.60
Woman, as recognised by Shirley and Anne Lister, is left unspoken in male-
authored texts.
Sometimes Lister would rework heterosexual relationships, as Lisa
Moore writes: ‘Lister (who also crossdressed) skilfully pillages the male-
authored texts available to her in order to authorise her desires, transforming
these masculine accoutrements into something else altogether: the conditions
of production of female homosexual character’.61 Just as Judith Butler argues
subversion of culturally imposed identities is possible only ‘within the terms
of the law’,62 so Lister constructs her lesbian identity from existing masculine
texts. Shirley also attempts such subversion by rewriting male narratives. She
rejects ‘Milton’s Eve’,63 claiming it ‘was his cook that he saw, or it was Mrs
Gill, as I have seen her, making custards’.64 Instead, Shirley conceives Eve as a
woman whose ‘daring could contend with Omnipotence’.65 Her Eve is a pagan
Eve, ‘a woman-Titan’.66 However, as Anne Lister’s construction of her lesbian
identity remains ‘within the terms of the law’, so Shirley is ultimately unable to
escape patriarchal narratives entirely, and must also be content to rewrite them,
rather than invent fresh narratives.
§
The connections between the story of Anne Lister and Charlotte Brontë’s
novel Shirley are startling. But what are we to do with them? The Brontës
have long suffered from a surfeit of biographical criticism. As Pauline Nestor
wrote of Charlotte: ‘Influential critics such as Leslie Stephens in the 1880s,
and Lord David Cecil in the 1930s have used a simple conflation of the life
and literature to denigrate Brontë’s work as involuntary self-revelation’.67
The danger of invoking the story of Anne Lister in our interpretation of
Shirley is that we once more prioritise biography in our reading of a Brontë
text. But rather than promoting a crude cause and effect relation between
Anne Lister’s diary and Charlotte Brontë’s novel, it may be more appropriate
to read Anne Lister’s journals as an intertext.
No text is a self-contained structure and no text is read in isolation.
Instead there is, as Jonathan Culler puts it, always a ‘general discursive
space that makes a text intelligible’.68 Lister’s diary has become part of the
general discursive space that makes Shirley intelligible. Reading Shirley
intertextually alongside Lister’s diaries allows us to open up Charlotte’s novel
to interpretations that previously may have been considered historically
anachronistic. Lister’s diary has been called ‘the Rosetta stone’ of lesbianism,
because, crucially, it contradicts the claims of commentators such as Lillian
Faderman, who argue that relationships between women were ‘non-genital’
before the twentieth century.69 Similarly, Lister’s diaries put pressure on
Foucault’s postulation that homosexual identity was not forged until it was
defined by the medical establishment. While Anne Lister did not identify
herself as a ‘lesbian’, of course, she did construct a self identity based on her
romantic and sexual attraction to women. The very existence of the Lister
diaries, therefore, allows us to read Shirley and Caroline’s relationship as more
than a ‘romantic friendship’ of the kind identified by Lillian Faderman.
Furthermore, reading Lister’s diaries intertextually alongside Shirley also
brings up very specific points of interpretation or contention. Sarah Waters
frequently plays upon the meanings of the word ‘queer’ in her Victorian
lesbian pastiche novels, Tipping the Velvet (1998), Affinity (1999) and
Fingersmith (2002). When her lesbian heroines describe themselves as ‘queer’,
Waters invokes both our contemporary understanding of the word ‘queer’ as
homosexual, and our awareness that this interpretation is ‘out of place’ in a
supposedly Victorian text. The word itself is common in Victorian fiction, but
an interpretation consistent with nineteenth century usage would be something
like the Oxford English Dictionary definition: ‘Strange, odd, peculiar, eccentric,
in appearance or character.’ And despite post-structuralist arguments that
all the semantic ‘traces’ of a word have an impact on our understanding of a
text, be they historically consistent with the date of the text’s production or
not, critics have traditionally resisted imposing any sexual interpretation on
180 Anne Longmuir
nineteenth century usages of ‘queer’. This reluctance is despite instances in

which our contemporary understanding of ‘queer’ would make contextual sense.
For example, when Caroline muses on the problems of unmarried women in
Shirley, she says: ‘Queer thoughts these, that surge my mind: are they right
thoughts?’.70 Of her relationship with Shirley, she states: ‘“Shirley, you are a
real enigma”, whispered Caroline in her ear. “What queer discoveries I make
day by day now!”’.71 In a Sarah Waters’ novel we would recognise a knowing
wink behind these uses of ‘queer’, but in Charlotte Brontë’s fiction, we do not
usually permit ourselves that interpretation. How then are we to figure Anne
Lister’s use of ‘queer’ in our interpretation of Charlotte’s novel?
‘Queer’ had a very specific sexual meaning for Anne Lister; she uses
the word to refer to the pudenda. She writes, for example: ‘Marianna put
me on a new watch riband & then cut the hair from her own queer & I
that from mine, which put each into little lockets we got at Bright’s this
morning, twelve shillings each, for us always to wear under our clothes in
mutual remembrance’.72 Anne Lister’s use of the word ‘queer’ in this way is
apparently the only known instance, though Helen Whitbread speculates
that it may be a corruption of quim or queme.73 While it may be reckless to
suggest that Anne Lister’s usage of ‘queer’ allows us to read the word as sexual
in Shirley, Lister’s employment of the word does force us to consider why two
female writers of the same period would adopt this word to refer implicitly
and explicitly to female sexuality. The Oxford English Dictionary definition is
useful here, because, of course, female sexuality was regarded as ‘strange, odd,
peculiar, [and] eccentric’ at least in public discourse in the mid-nineteenth
century. An intertextual reading of Shirley alongside Lister’s diaries can thus
bring the nuances of Charlotte’s text into focus.
But there are also some key differences between Shirley and Lister’s
diary. While Charlotte’s novel was written as a commercial, public text,
Lister’s diary is a private document, with a very small intended audience. As
Danielle Orr reminds us: ‘Our theorizing of these diaries and journals entails
an interference into the text, that was most likely not envisioned by these
women in the act of writing’.74 Journal writing is often interpreted as a means
of making the self, and Lister’s diary has been cited as extremely important in
this regard as she forges a prototypical lesbian identity for herself. Critics and
historians have also interpreted journal writing as a feminine endeavour, not
least because it belongs to the private sphere. In contrast, Charlotte’s novel
Shirley does not only belong to the public sphere, but Charlotte deliberately
attempted to adopt a more masculine discourse in this novel. As she wrote
to her publisher, James Taylor, shortly after its publication: ‘I imagined,
mistakenly it now appears, that “Shirley” bore fewer traces of the female hand
than “Jane Eyre”’.75 She abandoned the first person confessional narrative
— a style closer to Lister’s journal, of course — for the omniscient third
person narrative familiar from the works of Charles Dickens and William
Makepeace Thackeray. In other words, as Shirley adopts a kind of transvestism
to bolster her power, so Charlotte attempts a kind of literary transvestism
in this novel in an attempt to bolster her literary reputation. But as Shirley
and Lister’s failure to move beyond a patriarchal paradigm shows ultimately
the limits of their reimagining of the role of women, so Charlotte Brontë’s
adoption of a masculine discourse ultimately results in the re-enforcement of
patriarchal norms. Indeed, it is precisely because Charlotte’s text was written
for the public sphere that the resolution Anne Lister was able to achieve in
her private sphere proved impossible; what Anne Lister’s private discourse
permitted was literally ‘unsayable’ in mid-nineteenth century public discourse.
Indeed, lesbianism was even outside that most public of discourse in Britain,
the law, which criminalised male homosexuality, but remained tellingly silent
on the subject of female homosexuality.
So should Anne Lister and her diary be more than a footnote in any
reading of Shirley? The thematic similarities between Charlotte’s novel and
Lister’s life are remarkable and these should be recorded. This article attempts
to rectify this oversight. However, I am not suggesting a simple cause and
effect between Lister’s life and Shirley. Rather, I argue the real significance of
the Lister diaries lies in their role as intertexts. These diaries permit us to alter
our contemporary conception of the general discursive space that engendered
Shirley. In this way, Lister’s text allows a more explicitly sexual interpretation
of female relationships in Bronte’s novel than critics could previously have
considered. As such, the Lister diaries are more than a footnote, and have a
material impact on our understanding of Shirley.
No t e s
1. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction (New

York: Vintage, 1990), p. 43.
2. Nancy Quick Langer, ‘“There is no such Ladies Now-a-Days”: Capsizing
“the Patriarch Bull” in Charlotte Brontë’s “Shirley”’, Journal of Narrative Technique,
27.3 (1997), 276–296, p. 283.
3. Elizabeth Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Brontë (London: J. M. Dent, 1971),
p. 96.
4. Juliet Barker, The Brontës (London: Phoenix, 1994), p. 306.
5. The Oxford Companion to the Brontës, ed. by Christine Alexander and Mar-
garet Smith (Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 291.
6. Jill Liddington, ‘Anne Lister and Emily Brontë 1838–39: Landscape with
Figures’, Brontë Society Transactions, 26.1 (2001), 46–67, p. 46.
7. Liddington, ‘Anne Lister and Emily Brontë 1838–39’, p. 54.
8. Edward Chitham, A Life of Emily Brontë (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987),
p. 120.
182 Anne Longmuir

11. Elliott Vanskike, ‘Consistent Inconsistencies: The Transvestite Actress
Madame Vestris and Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley’, Nineteenth Century Literature
(NCF), 50.4 (1996), 464–488, p. 468.
12. Chitham, Life, p. 104.
13. Phyllis Bentley, The Brontës and their World (London: Thames & Hudson,
1969), p. 54.
15. Edward Chitham, The Birth of Wuthering Heights: Emily Brontë at Work
(Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1998), p. 188.
17. Anna Clark, ‘Anne Lister’s Construction of Lesbian Identity’, Journal of the
History of Sexuality, 7.1 (1996), 23–50, p. 42.
18. Clark, p. 47.
19. Anne Lister and Helena Whitbread, I Know My Own Heart: The Diaries of
Anne Lister, 1791–1840 (New York: New York University Press, 1992), p. 106.
20. Jill Liddington, ‘Gender, Authority and Mining in an Industrial Land-
scape: Anne Lister 1791–1840’, History Workshop Journal, 42 (1996), 59–86, p. 73.
22. Charlotte Brontë quoted in Elaine Miller, ‘Through all Changes and
through all Chances: The Relationship of Ellen Nussey and Charlotte Brontë’, in
Not a Passing Phase: Reclaiming Lesbians in History 1840–1985, ed. By Lesbian His-
tory Group (London: The Women’s Press, 1989), pp. 29–54, p. 36.
23. Charlotte Brontë, Shirley (London: Penguin, 1974), p. 213.
24. Jill Liddington, ‘Gender, Authority and Mining in an Industrial Land-
scape: Anne Lister 1791–1840’, History Workshop Journal, 42 (1996), 59–86, p. 82.
25. Brontë, Shirley, p. 208.
27. Anne Lister and Jill Liddington, Female Fortune: Land, Gender, and
Authority: The Anne Lister Diaries and Other Writings, 1833–36 (London: Rivers
Oram Press, 1998), p. 19.
29. Anne Lister, No Priest but Love: Excerpts from the Diaries of Anne Lister,
1824–1826 (Washington Square, N.Y.: New York University Press, 1992), p. 127.
32. Lister, No Priest But Love, p. 127.
33. Lister, No Priest But Love, pp. 42, 153.
35. Lister, I Know My Own Heart, p. 237.
37. Elizabeth Foyster, ‘Recovering Lives from behind the Gloss of Ideology:
Recent Histories of Elite and Middle-Class Women in England and America’, Gen-
der and History, 12.1 (2000), 237–242, p. 239.
38. Liddington, Female Fortune, p. 99.

46. Liddington, Female Fortune, p. 88.
47. Brontë, Shirley, pp. 124, 223, 224.
48. Jin Ok Kim, Charlotte Brontë and Female Desire (New York, NY: Peter
Lang, 2003), p. 71.
60. Clark, p. 32.
61. Lisa Moore, ‘“Something More Tender Still than Friendship”: Romantic
Friendship in Early-Nineteenth-Century England’, Feminist Studies, 18.3 (1992),
499–520.
62. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1999), p. 119.
67. New Casebooks: Villette, ed. by Pauline Nestor (Basingstoke: MacMillan,
1992), p. 2.
68. Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structural-
ism (London: Routledge, 1983), p. 106.
69. Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men (London: The Women’s
Press, 1985).
73. Lister, No Priest But Love, p. 55, n.1.
74. Dannielle Orr, ‘“I Tell Myself to Myself ”: Homosexual Agency in the
Journals of Anne Lister (1791–1840)’, Women’s Writing, 11.2 (2004), pp. 201–222
(p. 203).
75. Charlotte Brontë quoted in Tim Dolin, ‘Fictional Territory and a Woman’s
Place: Regional and Sexual Difference in “Shirley”’, ELH: Journal of English Literary
History, 62.1 (1995), 197–215, p. 201.
P atsy S toneman
“Addresses from the Land of the Dead”:

Emily Brontë and Shelley
‘We have seen that [Emily] and Anne read “Epipsychidion”, in which the
surprising addresses to “Emily” refer to Aemilia Viviani. To Emily Brontë,
they may have sounded like direct addresses from the land of the dead.’
(Edward Chitham, A Life of Emily Brontë, pp. 133–134)
E mily Brontë’s writing suggests that Percy Bysshe Shelley had a wide-
ranging influence on her ideas. His atheist attacks on religion, his political
attacks on aristocratic privilege and his condemnation of war-mongering are
likely to have intrigued a young woman who lived a secluded life in practical
terms, but imaginatively engaged on a daily basis with monarchs and repub-
lican rebels. Shelley’s life-story alone must have been exhilarating. This
essay sketches an outline of Shelley’s life, suggests how Emily Brontë may
have come to know it and his writings, and briefly outlines what previous
critics have made of the connection between the two writers. Its focus, how-
ever, is an aspect of Shelley’s life and writing which I believe had a central
influence on Wuthering Heights, although it has been consistently overlooked
by readers: his views on free love.1
The outline of Shelley’s life is well-known—he was a rebel in terms of
religion, class politics, and the convention of marriage. Born into the rural
gentry in Sussex, Percy Bysshe Shelley was the eldest of six children and
became a kind of wild hero to his four younger sisters, whom he enthralled
Brontë Studies, Volume 31, Number 2 (July 2006): pp. 121–131. © The Brontë Society
2006.
185
186 Patsy Stoneman
and terrified with gothic stories and scientific experiments. At Eton School,
he learned to hate authority and he was expelled from Oxford for atheism.
At the age of 19 he eloped with, and married, Harriet Westbrook (who
was only 16), and they went immediately to Ireland (with Harriet’s sister,
Eliza) to incite the Irish to revolt against English oppression. At 21 (in 1813)
he wrote Queen Mab, a long poem opposing conventional religion and social
tyranny. In 1814, having tired of Harriet, he eloped with another sixteen-year-
old, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, the daughter of the radical philosopher
William Godwin and the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. Mary’s step-sister,
Claire Clairmont, who was also 16, went with them to the continent, where
they met and lived close to Byron. In 1816, Shelley wrote his long poem,
Alastor, about a poet who dies in pursuit of an ideal woman. In the same
year, back in London, Harriet Shelley committed suicide and Mary became
Mary Shelley. During this time, Mary was working on her novel Frankenstein,
which contains a scarcely concealed criticism of Shelley’s early obsessions with
electrical experiments, ghosts, charnel houses and the pursuit of extremes; it
was published in 1818.
In 1817, however, Percy Shelley published another long political work,
originally entitled Laon and Cythna, in which the hero and heroine of the
title are both lovers and brother and sister. They are also revolutionary leaders
and, interestingly for the Emily Brontë connection, it is Cythna, the sister,
who takes the revolutionary initiatives, inciting the women in particular to
revolt, and advocating free love. It is also Cythna who arrives on her huge
black stallion in the nick of time to rescue Laon from execution. In the event,
the publisher took fright at the subject matter, and Shelley had to remove
the incestuous relationship, together with explicit references to atheism and
republicanism, before the poem was published as The Revolt of Islam.
1819 was a productive year for Shelley; he wrote The Mask of Anarchy,
a vitriolic attack on the repressive British government which had massacred
innocent people at Peterloo; he wrote a long verse-drama, Prometheus
Unbound, foretelling the liberation of the human race from tyranny; and he
wrote his Ode to the West Wind.
By 1821, the Shelleys were living in Pisa, where Shelley became
obsessed with Emilia Viviani, a young Italian woman (19 years old) who was
confined in a convent while her father found her a suitable husband. Shelley
addressed to her a long poem called Epipsychidion — which seems to mean
‘a song to the soul outside the soul’ — in which he declares that they are like
twin souls and invites her to come away with him. This is the poem which
has most obvious parallels with Wuthering Heights, and I shall come back to
this poem later. Epipsychidion had no practical outcome — Emilia’s father
found her a husband and, by 1822, the Shelleys had moved again, this time
“Addresses from the Land of the Dead”: Emily Brontë and Shelley 187
to Lerici, on the Italian coast, where he was drowned at sea, just short of his
thirtieth birthday.
It is difficult nowadays fully to comprehend how shockingly unorthodox
Shelley was in his own time, both in his life and in his writing. He professed
atheism, he advocated revolution (though not violence) and he not only lived
openly with a woman who was not his wife, but also surrounded himself with
other young women with whom he was emotionally, and sometimes sexually,
involved. His biographer, Richard Holmes, writes that
At the time of his death his reputation was almost literally

unspeakable in England, [. . .] In this he was quite unlike his
aristocratic friend and rival Lord Byron [. . .] [W]hile exile had
brought Byron fame and the kind of notoriety that is quickly
transmuted into fashionable glamour, it brought to Shelley both
literary obscurity and personal disrepute. (p. xiv)
Because of Shelley’s bad reputation, his friends and relatives at first thought
it useless to try to vindicate him, and so kept silent. In later Victorian times,
they conspired to produce a sentimentalised figure of ‘the gentle, suffering
lyric poet’ (p. xv) at the expense of the energetic rebel. For similar reasons,
Holmes writes, ‘there is virtually no literary criticism or critical commentary
which is worth reading before 1945’ (p. xvi).
This obscurity may explain why scholars were slow to make connections
between Shelley and the Brontës. Mrs Chadwick, writing in 1914, did note
parallels between Wuthering Heights and Epipsychidion (p. 340), but the first
critics to seriously consider such ideas were John Hewish in 1969 and Winifred
Gérin in 1971. Neither of them, however, devotes more than a few pages to
this link. The writer who has made most of the Shelley–Brontë connection is
Edward Chitham, first in an article in Brontë Society Transactions (1978), then in
his book, co-authored with Tom Winnifrith, Brontë Facts and Brontë Problems
(1983), and finally in his biography of Emily Brontë, published in 1987.
Once commentators started looking for the connection between Shelley
and the Brontës, it was clearly there to find. There is no doubt that the Brontës
had access to Shelley’s writing; the only problem is in determining just how
early they might have come across him. Chitham argues that Emily and Anne
could have been reading Shelley in their early teens (in the early 1830s); it is
certain, however, that all the sisters were familiar with his writing by 1838,
when Emily was 19 or 20.
It was through Byron that the Brontës came to know Shelley. Between
1830 and 1839, the Irish poet Tom Moore published three different
collections of Byron’s Letters, Journals, Works and Life, although there is no way
of knowing which version the Brontës had access to. Because Byron had lived
188 Patsy Stoneman
in close proximity with the Shelleys, and was father to Claire Clairmont’s
child, his letters and journals include much of the Shelley story, and the 1839
edition included an engraved portrait of Shelley by Aemilia Curran. From
1833 onwards, fragments of Shelley’s poetry also began to be published
and, in 1838, there was a long article on Shelley, including extracts from his
work, in Fraser’s Magazine, to which the Brontës had access. In 1839, Mary
Shelley published her edition of Shelley’s poems, and it seems certain that
the Brontës knew this. Both Hewish and Chitham offer detailed analyses of
Emily’s poetry from the 1840s showing Shelleyan echoes.
Whether Emily Brontë encountered Shelley in her early teens, as
Chitham claims, or whether it was later, the story of Shelley’s life and death
was recent enough to make a personal impression on her. Although she
was only four when Shelley died, his death fixed him forever as a figure of
youth. In addition, many of the key events in Shelley’s life happened when
he and the women he loved were near to Emily’s age when she read about
him — Shelley was 19 when he eloped with Harriet and she was 16; Mary
was also 16 at the time of her elopement, and so was her sister Claire; Emilia
Viviani was 19 when Shelley wrote Epipsychidion for her. The excitement of
these events was, however, crucially reinforced for Emily by the attraction
of his ideas and images — his hatred of tyrants and prisons, his impatience
with forms and conventions, his love of the imagination and his pursuit of
extremes of experience.
Because the area of ‘influence’ is so wide, different critics have picked
up different likenesses between the two writers. Three themes in particular
have been noticed: religious scepticism; political revolt; and a Romantic
desire for a blending of identities which has come to be called the ‘twin-soul’
idea. Chitham argues for the atheist influence (1978, p. 195) and both John
Hewish and Stevie Davies point out the Shelleyan echoes of one of Emily’s
last poems, ‘Why ask to know the date, the clime?’, which combines religious
and political scepticism in its bitter message. In this essay, however, I want
to focus not on the religious or political relationship between Emily Brontë
and Shelley, but on their ideas of Romantic love, and in particular on the
relationship between Wuthering Heights and Shelley’s poem, Epipsychidion.
By far the most widely recognised link between Shelley and Emily
Brontë has been in the area where human emotion passes into metaphysics
— a sense of ‘oneness’ with something outside the self. Sometimes this takes
the form of a union with nature, sometimes with another person. Hewish
compares Emily’s poem, ‘Aye, there it is!’ with Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind,
in which the poet implores the wind:
. . . Be thou, Spirit fierce,

My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!
Drive my dead thoughts over the universe

Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!
(Shelley, Ode to the West Wind, lines 61–64)
Emily Brontë seems more confident of the wind’s omnipresence:
And thou art now a spirit pouring

Thy presence into all—
The essence of the Tempest’s roaring
And of the Tempest’s fall—
A universal influence
From Thine own influence free;
A principle of life, intense,
Lost to mortality.
(from Aye, there it is!: Hatfield No. 148)
In Epipsychidion, however, Shelley speaks of the union of two human souls,

writing to his beloved:
How beyond refuge I am thine. Ah me!

I am not thine: I am a part of thee.
(Epipsychidion, lines 51–52)
and Mrs Chadwick was the first of several critics to set these lines against
Catherine’s words in Wuthering Heights: ‘I am Heathcliff ’ and ‘He’s more
myself than I am’ (Chadwick p. 340). Mary Visick, in her book, The Genesis
of ‘Wuthering Heights’, does not mention Shelley, but she does combine the
ideas of oneness with a universal spirit, and of oneness with another human
being, by reading Wuthering Heights in terms of Emily’s poem, ‘No Coward
Soul is Mine’. Because the poem refers to a spirit of life in terms so similar
to those in which Catherine refers to Heathcliff, Visick argues that the rela-
tionship between Catherine and Heathcliff should be read as a metaphor for
‘a communion of the individual being with vitality itself ’ (Visick p. 41).
Visick begins by quoting ‘No Coward Soul is Mine’:
O God within my breast

Almighty ever-present Deity
Life, that in me hast rest
As I Undying Life, have power in Thee [. . .]
Though Earth and moon were gone

And suns and universes ceased to be
190 Patsy Stoneman
And thou wert left alone

Every Existence would exist in thee [. . .]
‘No Coward Soul is Mine’ (1846)
(Hatfield No. 191)
She sets this against the famous passage from Chapter 9 of Wuthering Heights,
where Catherine makes a kind of manifesto declaration of her love:
‘I cannot express it; but surely you and everybody have a notion
that there is or should be an existence of yours beyond you.
What were the use of my creation, if I were entirely contained
here? My great miseries in the world have been Heathcliff ’s
miseries, and I watched and felt each from the beginning: my
great thought in living is himself. If all else perished and he
remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained,
and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty
stranger: I should not seem a part of it. My love for Linton is like
the foliage in the woods. Time will change, it, I’m well aware,
as winter changes the trees — my love for Heathcliff resembles
the eternal rocks beneath — a source of little visible delight,
but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff ! He’s always, always in my
mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to
myself, but as my own being.’ (Chapter 9, Oxford World’s Clas-
sics edition, pp. 81–2)
Visick argues that by comparing this passage with the poem, ‘we see what
Wuthering Heights is “about”. Catherine betrays what amounts to a mystical
vocation, for social position and romantic love’ (p. 9).
This statement is of great importance in relation to Shelley since Shelley
also deals in both ‘mystical vocations’ (for instance, in Alastor, where the hero
dies in unfulfilled pursuit of an ideal beauty), and in ‘romantic love’ (as in
Epipsychidion, where Emilia Viviani is entreated to join him in an idyllic
escape). The concept of ‘romantic love’, however, needs clarification. When
Visick links ‘social position’ with ‘romantic love’, it becomes clear that what
she means by ‘romantic love’ is the process of love and courtship which leads
to marriage, which corresponds to Catherine’s relationship with Edgar rather
than that with Heathcliff. If we put the word ‘romantic’ in the context of the
Romantic movement, however — Romantic with a capital R — we find that
the Romantic poets were very likely to fall in love not with marriageable
partners, with whom they could settle down and have a family, but with
figures outside normal social structures, sometimes seen as images of beauty
or the imagination (as in Shelley’s Alastor) and sometimes seen as sisters (as
in Shelley’s Laon and Cythna).
In psychoanalytic terms, this kind of Romantic love is very different from
the romantic love which provides the plot of Mills and Boon fiction — or, for
that matter, Jane Eyre. Romantic love with a capital R is by its nature tragic; it
is characteristic, therefore, that Emilia Viviani is locked up in a convent, and
more like a dream lover than a real woman. Psychoanalysts tell us that this
kind of love is not really a relationship with another mature individual, but
rather an attempt to recreate the security of childhood, in which the gaze of a
mother or a sibling reflects back one’s own sense of existence and importance.
It is thus interesting that Shelley’s childhood was spent in the company of
four adoring younger sisters, and that both his marriages included his wives’
sisters, as well as other women whom he described as ‘sisters of his soul’. In
Wuthering Heights, Catherine and Heathcliff, we remember, are also brought
up as brother and sister.
Shelley, writing to Emilia Viviani, wishes,
Would we two had been twins of the same mother! (line 45)
and the image of two identical persons gazing at each other is reminiscent
of the myth of Narcissus, who died for love of his own image in a pool.
Typically, this regressive form of Romantic love does not look forward to
social integration but imagines escape from ordinary life, or sometimes from
life altogether — Shelley’s Laon and Cythna, for instance, die together and
are reunited in a kind of visionary heaven.
Shelley’s Epipsychidion is undoubtedly the most famous and extravagant
expression of this kind of love. His appeal to his beloved is couched in terms
of the most idyllic escape:
Emily,
A ship is floating in the harbour now,
A wind is hovering o’er the mountain’s brow;
There is a path on the sea’s azure floor,
No keel has ever ploughed that path before;
The halcyons brood over the foamless isles;
The treacherous Ocean has forsworn its wiles;
The merry mariners are bold and free:
Say, my heart’s sister, wilt thou sail with me? (lines
407–415)
His concept of ‘oneness’ is so overwhelming that he can hardly contain the

emotion it arouses:
192 Patsy Stoneman
We shall become the same, we shall be one . . .

In one another’s substance finding food,
Like flames too pure and light and unimbued
To nourish their bright lives with baser prey,
Which point to Heaven and cannot pass away:
One hope within two wills, one will beneath
Two overshadowing minds, one life, one death,
One Heaven, one Hell, one immortality,
And one annihilation. Woe is me!
The winged words on which my soul would pierce
Into the height of Love’s rare Universe,
Are chains of lead around its flight of fire —
I pant, I sink, I tremble, I expire!
If we go back to that famous passage from Chapter 9 of Wuthering Heights

(skipping a little), we must see that the similarities are remarkable:
‘I cannot express it; but surely you and everybody have a notion that
there is or should be an existence of yours beyond you. What were
the use of my creation, if I were entirely contained here? [. . .] If all
else perished and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if
all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn
to a mighty stranger: I should not seem a part of it. [. . .] Nelly I am
Heathcliff! He’s always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any
more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being’.
(Wuthering Heights, Ch. 9, pp. 81–82)
One remarkable thing about Shelley’s notion of ‘oneness’, however, is that

despite its extravagant expression, it is not conceived as exclusive. His most
impassioned expressions of oneness with Emilia — whom he calls ‘Emily’
— includes a wish to assimilate her into his existing relation with Mary. The
expression is not quite straightforward in this passage but the ‘name’ which
the world will apply to his love for Emily is presumably ‘adulterous’, and ‘the
name my heart lent to another’ is ‘wife’:
I never thought before my death to see

Youth’s vision thus made perfect. Emily,
I love thee; though the world by no thin name
Will hide that love from its unvalued shame.
Would we two had been twins of the same mother!
Or, that the name my heart lent to another
Could be a sister’s bond for her and thee,

Blending two beams of one eternity!
Yet were one lawful and the other true,
These names, though dear, could paint not, as is due
How beyond refuge I am thine. Ah me!
I am not thine: I am a part of thee.
Some critics of Wuthering Heights have toyed with the idea that, like
Shelley, Catherine Earnshaw hopes to keep both her lovers — one as
husband, and one as lover. None of them, however, takes the idea seriously.
Arnold Kettle, in his Introduction to the English Novel, says that she ‘kid[s]
herself that she can keep them both’ (p. 255). Q. D. Leavis says that
Catherine’s idea ‘that she would be able both to have her cake and eat it
[is] a childish fallacy’. Edward Chitham entertains the idea most seriously,
saying that ‘critics who suppose that Emily allows Cathy to reject Edgar in
favour of Heathcliff, or vice versa, have not read carefully enough. Cathy
intends, in different ways, to love both; perhaps Emily obtained this idea
from Shelley’ (1987, p. 73). This is, however, all he says; he does not develop
the idea.
I want to argue, however, not only that Emily got this idea from Shelley,
but that the tension it produces is the governing idea of the novel. I find it
remarkable that of all the critics who have noticed that the ‘twin-soul’ idea
in Epipsychidion relates closely to Wuthering Heights, not one has noticed
the relevance of the even more famous passage, from the same poem, which
contains Shelley’s manifesto of free love:
I never was attached to that great sect,

Whose doctrine is, that each one should select
Out of the crowd a mistress or a friend,
And all the rest, though fair and wise, commend
To cold oblivion, though it is in the code
Of modern morals, and the beaten road
Which those poor slaves with weary footsteps tread,
Who travel to their home among the dead
By the broad highway of the world, and so
With one chained friend, perhaps a jealous foe,
The dreariest and the longest journey go.
True Love in this differs from gold and clay,

That to divide is not to take away.
Love is like understanding, that grows bright,
194 Patsy Stoneman
Gazing on many truths; ’tis like thy light,

Imagination! which from earth and sky,
And from the depths of human fantasy,
As from a thousand prisms and mirrors, fills
The Universe with glorious beams, and kills
Error, the worm, with many a sun-like arrow
Of its reverberated lightning. Narrow
The heart that loves, the brain that contemplates,
The life that wears, the spirit that creates
One object, and one form, and builds thereby
A sepulchre for its eternity.
The passage is notorious in the context of unconventional sexual experi-

ments. Sue Bridehead quotes lines immediately following these in Jude the
Obscure (IV v) and E. M. Forster took the phrase, ‘the longest journey’ as
the title of his novel exposing the tragedy of conventional marriage. Critics
of Emily Brontë, however, have been very reluctant to notice its relevance
to Wuthering Heights. Yet, just as Shelley’s declaration of oneness with
Emily is placed in the context of his existing relationship with Mary, so
Catherine’s declaration of oneness with Heathcliff is prompted by her deci-
sion to marry Edgar. The passage I have already quoted twice, beginning ‘I
cannot express it’, is in fact thoroughly embedded in dialogue exposing the
practical difficulties of her intention to keep both her lovers. Immediately
before Catherine’s declaration of oneness, Nelly tries to alert her to the
probable impact of her proposed marriage, first on Heathcliff, and then on
Catherine herself:
‘As soon as you become Mrs. Linton, he loses friend, and love,
and all! Have you considered how you’ll bear the separation, and
how he’ll bear to be quite deserted in the world? Because, Miss
Catherine—’
‘He quite deserted! We separated!’ she exclaimed, with an accent

of indignation. ‘Who is to separate us, pray? They’ll meet the fate
of Milo! Not as long as I live, Ellen — for no mortal creature.
Every Linton on the face of the earth might melt into nothing,
before I could consent to forsake Heathcliff. Oh, that’s not what I
intend — that’s not what I mean! I shouldn’t be Mrs. Linton were
such a price demanded! He’ll be as much to me as he has been all
his lifetime. Edgar must shake off his antipathy, and tolerate him,
at least. He will when he learns my true feelings towards him.
Nelly, I see now, you think me a selfish wretch, but did it never
strike you that if Heathcliff and I married, we should be beggars?
Whereas, if I marry Linton, I can aid Heathcliff to rise, and place
him out of my brother’s power.’
‘With your husband’s money, Miss Catherine?’ I asked. ‘You’ll

find him not so pliable as you calculate upon: and, though I’m
hardly a judge, I think that’s the worst motive you’ve given yet for
being the wife of young Linton.’
‘It is not,’ retorted she, ‘it is the best! The others were the satisfac-
tion of my whims; and for Edgar’s sake, too, to satisfy him. This is
for the sake of one who comprehends in his person my feelings to
Edgar and myself. I cannot express it; but surely you . . .’
(Wuthering Heights, Chapter 9, p. 81)
Catherine’s attempt to ‘express’ her oneness with Heathcliff is thus an effort

to assert a Shelleyan notion of identity with the loved one which is somehow
outside social conventions. She believes that this relationship is so differ-
ent from that with Edgar that the two will not interfere with one another.
The passage usually quoted ends ‘He’s always, always in my mind: not as
a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own
being’. It is less often noticed that Nelly immediately places this in the social
context that Catherine is trying to avoid: ‘If I can make any sense of your
nonsense, Miss, [. . .] it only goes to convince me that you are ignorant of
the duties you undertake in marrying; or else, that you are a wicked, unprin-
cipled girl’ (Wuthering Heights, Ch. 9, p. 82).
One reason why critics and readers have been reluctant to recognise that
Emily Brontë may deliberately have been exploring ‘wicked, unprincipled’
ideas is that the implications of free love are very different for a woman.
Men have always been more ‘free’ in this respect, and feminists were quick
to point out that Shelley’s practice of ‘free love’ left the women holding the
babies. For a woman to have more than one lover, however, challenges the
normal expectation that a man should be able to identify his offspring with
certainty. In Wuthering Heights, it is impossible to say whether Catherine has,
or intends to have, a sexual relation with Heathcliff. What is certain, however,
is that Catherine never achieves the kind of ménage á trois which Shelley had
with Mary and Claire, because the men would not tolerate it. The reason why
Kettle and Leavis call Catherine’s idea ‘childish’ is that it ignores traditional
masculine reactions. Women, like Mary and Claire, or Mary and Emilia, may
co-operate in shared relationships with their man, but men expect to have
exclusive possession of their women.
196 Patsy Stoneman
The contrast between Catherine’s expectations and those of her menfolk

is sharply exposed in Wuthering Heights when Heathcliff returns to find
Catherine married to Edgar. Surprisingly, Catherine shows no sense of tragic
mistiming; she does not lament, ‘too late, too late!’ Instead, she is wildly
happy, and sets about arranging a tea-party to be shared by both her men. It
is the men who refuse to co-operate, and Edgar who states the ultimatum:
‘Will you give up Heathcliff hereafter, or will you give up me? It is impossible
for you to be my friend and his at the same time; and I absolutely require to
know which you choose’ (p. 118). A careful reading of the novel from here
on shows that Catherine is bewildered by their refusal to share her attention.
Even on her deathbed, she insists that ‘you and Edgar have broken my heart,
Heathcliff ! And you both come to bewail the deed to me, as if you were the
people to be pitied!’ (p. 158).
For a detailed working-out of this reading of the novel, I must refer
you to my Introduction to the World’s Classics edition of Wuthering
Heights, or to the more extended version which appeared as an article in
The Review of English Studies. Briefly, here, let me say that it seems to me to
make sense of what happens after Catherine’s death. It is puzzling, when
you consider, that Catherine’s ghost begs to be let in even while Heathcliff
begs her to return. What keeps them apart? The answer may be that even
after Catherine’s death, Heathcliff cannot focus directly on their love for
one another, but must convert his grief into revenge against Edgar. If my
reading is correct, and Catherine hoped to keep both men in relation to her,
the plaint of her ghost, ‘Let me in — let me in!’ (p. 23) could be a plea to
Heathcliff to open his heart simply to love for her, instead of diverting it to
revenge. In this reading, the crucial change comes when Heathcliff observes
young Catherine and Hareton, who are now the objects of his revenge, and
sees not only that they love one another, but that they both look like his
Catherine, so that his revenge is effectively against her. When he gives up
revenge, ‘rapture’ dispels ‘anguish’ (p. 331), and it is his ‘soul’s bliss’ which
‘kills [his] body’ (p. 333).
The last paragraphs of Wuthering Heights are notoriously ambiguous,
since two different accounts are given of the lovers after death: the shepherd
boy sees ‘Heathcliff and a woman’ (p. 336) walking on the moors, but
Lockwood looks at the graveyard and wonders ‘how any one could ever
imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth’ (p. 338).
Lockwood’s ‘sleepers’, however, are not exactly the same as the boy’s ‘walkers’,
because Lockwood describes three headstones, and we know that Catherine,
in the middle, wears a locket in which Nelly had twisted the hair of both
Edgar and Heathcliff (p. 168). It has been easy for readers to accept that the
two ‘walkers’ are Shelley’s twin souls. What I want to argue is that the three
‘sleepers’ are the tragic remains of Emily Brontë’s experiment in reversing

the genders of Shelley’s free love.
No t e
1. The main argument of this essay has already appeared twice in print:
in Patsy Stoneman, ‘Catherine Earnshaw’s Journey to Her Home Among the
Dead: Fresh Thoughts on Wuthering Heights and “Epipsychidion”’, The Review of
English Studies, New Series, Vol XLVII, No. 188 (1996), pp. 521–533; and in the
Introduction by Patsy Stoneman in Wuthering Heights, Oxford World’s Classics,
by Emily Bronte (1998). This material is reproduced here by permission of Oxford
University Press.
Bibl io gr a ph y
Christine Alexander and Jane Sellars. The Art of the Brontës, Cambridge University Press,
1995, pp. 386–387 [for EB’s drawing of ‘The North Wind’ (Ianthe from Shelley’s
‘Queen Mab’)].
Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, (1847) Introduction by Patsy Stoneman. Oxford World’s
Classics. Oxford University Press, (1995) 1998.
Lord David Cecil, ‘Emily Brontë and Wuthering Heights’, in Early Victorian Novelists, London:
Constable, 1934, pp. 147–193 [‘metaphysical’ reading of Wuthering Heights—no
Shelley references].
Mrs Ellis H Chadwick, In the Footsteps of the Brontës. London: Pitman, 1914, p. 340 (for the
‘twin soul’ theme).
Edward Chitham, ‘Emily Brontë and Shelley’, Brontë Society Transactions, 17 (1978), pp.
189–196.
Edward Chitham, A Life of Emily Brontë. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987, pp. 72–73, 98–,
133–134.
Edward Chitham and Tom Winnifrith. Brontë Facts and Brontë Problems. London: Macmillan,
1983 (especially Chapter 6, ‘Emily Brontë and Shelley’).
Stevie Davies, Emily Brontë: Heretic, London: The Women’s Press, 1994, pp. 194–195,
239–242 (for Shelleyan political radicalism).
Winifred Gérin, Emily Brontë, (1971) Oxford University Press, 1978, pp. 153–154 (evidence
of EB’s knowledge of Shelley and parallels in their writing).
C.W. Hatfield (ed), The Complete Poems of Emily Jane Brontë, New York: Columbia University
Press, 1941.
John Hewish, Emily Brontë, London: Macmillan, 1969 (early references to Shelleyan
influence).
Richard Holmes, Shelley: The Pursuit, (1974) New York Review Books, 1994 (excellent
biography).
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Selected Poetry and Prose. Introduction by Bruce Woodcock. Wordsworth
Editions, 1994 (other editions available).
Patsy Stoneman, ‘Introduction’, Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, Oxford World’s Classics.
Oxford University Press, 1995 (for parallel with Shelley’s ‘free love’ argument in
‘Epipsychidion’).
———. ‘Catherine Earnshaw’s Journey to her Home Among the Dead’: Fresh Thoughts
on Wuthering Heights and ‘Epipsychidion’. Review of English Studies, New Series
198 Patsy Stoneman
Vol. XLVII, No. 188 (1996), pp. 521–533 (extended version of the theory in the
‘Introduction’ above).
Mary Visick, The Genesis of ‘Wuthering Heights’, (1958) Hong Kong University Press, 1967 (for
‘metaphysical oneness’—no Shelley references).
Chronology
1812 The Reverend Patrick Brontë marries Maria Branwell.

1814 Maria Brontë, their first child, born.
1815 Elizabeth Brontë born.
1816 Charlotte Brontë born on April 21.
1817 Patrick Branwell Brontë, the only son, born in June.
1818 Emily Jane Brontë born on July 30.
1820 Anne Brontë born on January 17. The Brontë family moves to
the parsonage at Haworth, near Bradford, Yorkshire.
1821 Mrs. Brontë dies of cancer in September. Her sister, Elizabeth
Branwell, takes charge of the household.
1824 Maria and Elizabeth attend the Clergy Daughters’ School at
Cowan Bridge. Charlotte follows them in August, and Emily in
November.
1825 The two oldest girls, Maria and Elizabeth, contract tubercu-
losis at school. Maria dies on May 6; Elizabeth dies June 15.
Charlotte and Emily are withdrawn from the school on June 1.
Charlotte and Emily do not return to school until they are in
their teens; in the meantime they are educated at home.
1826 Charlotte and Branwell begin the “Angrian” stories and maga-
zines; Emily and Anne work on the “Gondal” saga.
199
200 Chronology
1831 Charlotte attends Miss Wooler’s school. She leaves the school
seven months later, to tend to her sisters’ education. In 1835,
however, she returns as governess. She is accompanied by Emily.
1835 After three months, Emily leaves Miss Wooler’s school because
of homesickness. Anne arrives in January 1836 and remains until
December 1837.
1837 In September, Emily becomes a governess at Miss Patchett’s
school, near Halifax.
1838 In May, Charlotte leaves her position at Miss Wooler’s school.
1839 Anne becomes governess for the Ingram family at Blake Hall,
Mirfield. She leaves in December. Charlotte becomes governess
in the Sidwick family, at Stonegappe Hall, near Skipton. She
leaves after two months (July).
1840 All three sisters live at Haworth.
1841 Anne becomes governess in the Robinson family, near York.
Charlotte becomes governess in the White family and moves to
Upperwood House, Rawdon. She leaves in December. The sisters
plan to start their own school. The scheme, attempted several
years later, fails for lack of inquiries.
1842 Charlotte and Emily travel to Brussels to study in the Pensionnat
Heger.
1843 Branwell joins Anne in York as tutor to the Robinson family.
Charlotte returns to Brussels and remains until January 1844.
1845 Charlotte discovers Emily’s poetry and suggests that a selection
be published along with the poetry of herself and Anne.
1846 Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell is published by Aylott
& Jones. During their lifetimes, all works by the Brontës are
published under these pseudonyms: Charlotte was Currer Bell;
Emily was Ellis Bell; Anne was Acton Bell.
1847 Jane Eyre: An Autobiography (edited by Currer Bell), Wuthering
Heights, and Agnes Grey are published.
1848 Anne’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall published by T. C. Newby,
which tries to sell it to an American publisher as a new book
by Currer Bell, author of the immensely popular Jane Eyre.
Smith, Elder & Co. requests that Charlotte bring her sisters to
London to prove that there are three Bells. Charlotte and Anne
Chronology 201
visit London. Branwell and Emily die of tuberculosis, he on

September 24, she on December 19.
1849 Anne dies of tuberculosis May 28. Charlotte’s Shirley by
Currer Bell published by Smith, Elder & Co. Charlotte meets
Thackeray and Harriet Martineau in London.
1850 Charlotte meets G. H. Lewes and Mrs. Gaskell in London.
Edits her sisters’ work. Smith, Elder & Co. publish a new edi-
tion of Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey, along with some of
Anne’s and Emily’s poetry, and a “Biographical Notice” of her
sisters’ lives by Charlotte.
1852 The Reverend A. B. Nicholls proposes marriage to Charlotte.
Her father objects, and Nicholls is rejected. Eventually, Reverend
Brontë yields, and Charlotte marries in June 1854.
1853 Charlotte’s Villette as Currer Bell published in January.
1855 Charlotte dies of toxemia of pregnancy, March 31.
1857 Charlotte’s The Professor published posthumously with a preface
written by her husband. Mrs. Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Bronté
published in March.
1860 “Emma,” a fragment of a story by Charlotte, published in The
Cornhill Magazine with an introduction by Thackeray.
1861 The Reverend Patrick Brontë dies.
Contributors
HAROLD BLOOM is Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale Uni-

versity. He is the author of 30 books, including Shelley’s Mythmaking (1959),
The Visionary Company (1961), Blake’s Apocalypse (1963), Yeats (1970), A Map
of Misreading (1975), Kabbalah and Criticism (1975), Agon: Toward a Theory of
Revisionism (1982), The American Religion (1992), The Western Canon (1994),
and Omens of Millennium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams, and Resurrection (1996).
The Anxiety of Influence (1973) sets forth Professor Bloom’s provocative theory
of the literary relationships between the great writers and their predecessors.
His most recent books include Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998),
a 1998 National Book Award finalist, How to Read and Why (2000), Genius:
A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds (2002), Hamlet: Poem
Unlimited (2003), Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? (2004), and Jesus and Yahweh:
The Names Divine (2005). In 1999, Professor Bloom received the prestigious
American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for Criticism. He has
also received the International Prize of Catalonia, the Alfonso Reyes Prize of
Mexico, and the Hans Christian Andersen Bicentennial Prize of Denmark.
Humphrey Gawthrop was a contributor to the journal Brontë Stud-

ies. He died in 2004.
Alexandra Leach has written about creation myths in children’s

books.
Essaka Joshua is a lecturer at the University of Birmingham, U.K.

She has written Pygmalion and Galatea: The History of a Narrative in English
Literature (2001) and The Romantics and the May-Day Tradition (2007).
203
204 Contributors
K. C. Belliappa is professor of English at the University of Mysore in

India. He wrote The Image of India in English Fiction (1991).
Rebecca Fraser, daughter of Antonia Fraser, is past president of the

Brontë Society. In addition to illustrating books by her mother, she has writ-
ten The Brontës: Charlotte Brontë and Her Family (1988) and A People’s History
of Britain (2003).
James Reaney was professor of English at the University of Western

Ontario from 1963 until his retirement. A prolific and accomplished poet
and playwright, he is a two-time winner of the Governor’s Award for Poetry
(1949 and 1958) and the Governor’s Award for Drama (1962). He is a life
member of the League of Canadian Poets.
Meghan Bullock is a contributor to the journal Brontë Studies.
Paul Edmondson is Head of Education at the Shakespeare Birth-

place Trust in Stratford-Upon-Avon. He is co-supervisory editor of the Pen-
guin Shakespeare and co-author (with Stanley Wells) of Shakespeare’s Sonnets
(2004). His study of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night was published in 2005.
Birgitta Berglund is a senior lecturer in English literature at Lund

University, Sweden. She is a member of the Jane Austen Society, the Doro-
thy L. Sayers Society, and the Brontë Society.
Joan Bellamy taught in the U.K. Open University and prepared many
study guides for students, including Mary Taylor: “Strong-Minded” Woman
and Friend of the Brontës (1997). She retired as reviews editor of Brontë Stud-
ies in 2005.
Susan Ostrov Weisser is a professor of English at Adelphi Univer-

sity. She is the author of A Craving Vacancy: Women and Sexual Love in the
British Novel, 1740–1880 (1997). Among her edited books are Women and
Romance: A Reader (2001) and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (2003), which
reprints the novel with supplementary material for students.
Anne Longmuir is assistant professor of English at Kansas State Uni-

versity. She has published articles on Don DeLillo and Wilkie Collins.
Patsy Stoneman is an emeritus reader in English at the University

of Hull in East Yorkshire, England. She is the author of Brontë Transforma-
tions: The Cultural Dissemination of ‘Jane Eyre’ and ‘Wuthering Heights’ (1996)
and has edited the Macmillan New Casebook on Wuthering Heights (1993)
and Palgrave’s Reader’s Guide to Essential Criticism of Wuthering Heights
(2000). Her Jane Eyre On Stage, 1848-1898 was published in 2005.
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lish, vol. 30, no. 1 (Winter 2002): 38–41.
The following articles are reprinted by permission of Maney Publishing on

behalf of Brontë Studies: The Journal of the Brontë Society and the Brontë So-
ciety. These articles can be found at http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/
maney/bst or www.maney.co.uk/journals/bronte.
Fraser, Rebecca. “Monsieur Heger: Critic or Catalyst in the Life of Char-

lotte Brontë?” Brontë Studies: The Journal of the Brontë Society, Volume 28,
Number 3 (November 2003): 185–194.
209
210 Acknowledgments
Reaney, James. “The Brontës: Gothic Transgressor as Cattle Drover.” Brontë

Studies: The Journal of the Brontë Society, Volume 29, Number 1 (March 2004):
27–35.
Bullock, Meghan. “Abuse, Silence, and Solitude in Anne Brontë’s The Tenant
of Wildfell Hall.” Brontë Studies: The Journal of the Brontë Society, Volume 29,
Number 2 ( July 2004): 135–141.
Edmondson, Paul. “Shakespeare and the Brontës.” Brontë Studies: The Journal
of the Brontë Society, Volume 29, Number 3 (November 2004): 185–198.
Berglund, Birgitta. “In Defence of Madame Beck.” Brontë Studies: The Journal
of the Brontë Society, Volume 30, Number 3 (November 2005): 185–211.
Bellamy, Joan. “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall: What Anne Brontë Knew and
What Modern Readers Don’t.” Brontë Studies: The Journal of the Brontë Society,
Volume 30, Number 3 (November 2005): 255–257.
Weisser, Susan Ostrov. “Charlotte Brontë, Jane Austen, and the Meaning of
Love.” Brontë Studies: The Journal of the Brontë Society, Volume 31, Number 2
( July 2006): 93–100.
Longmuir, Anne. “Anne Lister and Lesbian Desire in Charlotte Brontë’s

Shirley.” Brontë Studies: The Journal of the Brontë Society, Volume 31, Number
2 ( July 2006): 145–155.
Stoneman, Patsy. “Addresses from the Land of the Dead’: Emily Brontë and
Shelley.” Brontë Studies: The Journal of the Brontë Society, Volume 31, Number
2 ( July 2006): 121–131.
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Index
abolitionism, 15 Bassompierre, Paulina de (character),

Act of Parliament, 158 77, 126, 140, 145
Adèle (character), 20 Beatrice (character), 113, 163
adultery, 158–159 Beaty, Jerome, 36
Affinity, 179 Beck, Madame Modeste (character),
Africa, 14, 80, 83–84, 86 78, 122–124, 127–136, 138,
Ainley, Miss (character), 176 140–149
Alastor, 186, 190 Belcombe, Dr. Marianna (character),
American Review, 110 175, 177
And the Weary Are at Rest, 81, 88 Belgium, 68, 73, 78, 107
“Angel in the House, The,” 165 Brussels, 16, 26, 67–68, 71, 75,
Angria (fictional location), 67, 75, 77–78 121, 126, 149
80–81, 85–86, 167
Bell, Acton, 110
Angrian people, 81
Bell, Currer, 110
anorexia, 136
Bell, Ellis, 110
Antigua (ship), 16
Bendigo, see Thompson, William
Antoinetta (character), 14
Antony, Marc, 116 “Abednego”, 15
Antony and Cleopatra, 114–115 Benedick (character), 113
Arnold, Margaret J., 110 Bennet, Elizabeth (character), 162,
As You Like It, 112 169
atheism, 185–187 Bentley, Phyllis, 123, 173
Athenee Royale, 70 Benwick (character), 164
Austen, Jane, 101, 103–104, 161–169 Berowne, Lord (character), 113
“Aye, there it is!,” 188 Bertha, 14, 19, 20, 21
Bertha (character), 167–168
Banks, Lynne Reid, 104 Bertram, Edmund (character), 104
Banquo (character), 110, 115 bestiality, 158
Barker, Juliet, 15, 122 Beverly Arms Hotel, 67
Bassompierre, Count de (character), Bible, 37, 41, 43, 48, 51, 104
129 bildungsroman, 64
211
212 Index
“Biographical Notice of Ellis and Brontë Society, 67–68, 74, 161

Acton Bell,” 149 Brontë Society Transactions, 187
Blackwoods Magazine, 16 Burney, Fanny, 101
Bleak House, 107 Burns, Helen (character), 51
Bolton, John, 16 Butler, Judith, 178
Bonaparte, Napoleon, 80, 109 Byron, George Gordon, 26
Borges, Jorge Louis, 85 Byron, Lord, 106, 164, 186–187
Bowdler, Henrietta, 105 Byron’s Letters, Journals, Works and
Bowdler, Thomas, 105 Life, 187
Branwell, Aunt, 67, 69
Braun, Fraülein (character), 127 Caesar, Julius (character), 108
Bretton, Dr. John Graham Caliban (character), 116–117
(character), 76, 124, 126–127, Calvinism, 50, 53
136, 138, 147–148 Cambridge University, 101
Bretton, Mrs. (character), 124–125, Campbell, Thomas, 106
130–131, 133 Canning, 16
Briarfield, 175 “Captive Dove, The,” 28
Bridehead, Sue, 194 “Captive’s Dream, The,” 28
Britain, 68 Caribbean, 14, 16
British Embassy Chaplain, 70 Cassius (character), 108
British Empire, 63 Catherine (character), see Earnshaw,
British Library, 72 14, 18–19, 63–64, 110–111, 113,
Brontë, Anne, 25–33, 69, 91, 103, 189–191, 193–196
116, 118, 157–159, 167 172, Catholic Church, 137
Brontë, Branwell, 15–16, 26, 33, Catholicism, 54
79–85, 87–88, 90, 105, 116, 118 Cathy (character), 19–20, 115, 117
Brontë, Charlotte, 13, 15–16, 20, Caunt, Ben, 15
25, 28, 33, 36–38, 52, 56, 67–79, Cecil, David, 179
103–106, 108–109, 116, 118, 121– Celtic, 68
123, 126, 146–150, 158, 161–171, Chadwick, Mrs., 187, 189
173, 176–177, 179, 181 Characterisations of Women, Moral,
Brontë, Emily, 13, 15, 17–19, 21, Poetical and Historical, 105
25, 27, 30, 32–33, 63, 65, 68, Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays, 105
103–105, 110–112, 114, 116, 118, Charles I (English king), 51
167, 172–173, 185 Child of Earth, 172
Brontë, Reverend Patrick, 15, 52–54, child slavery, 21
69–70, 83, 88–89, 105, 109 Chitham, Edward, 17, 31, 173, 187,
Brontë, 172 193
Brontë Facts and Brontë Problems, 187 Christ, Jesus, 37, 40–41, 49, 51, 54
Brontë Parsonage Museum, 79, 90, Christianity, 35–56
104 Christian moralism, 168
Brontës and Religion, The, 145 Claiborn, Claire, 195
Brontës in Ireland, The, 88, 90 Clairmont, Claire, 186, 188
Index 213
Clark, Anna, 178 Duke of Wellington, 80

Clarkson, Thomas, 20 Duke of Zamorna, 69
Cleopatra (character), 115 Duncan, King (character), 103, 115
Clergy Daughters School, 15 Dury, Keighley, 15
Coleridge, Hartley, 69 Dury, Theodore, 15
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 107, 117 Duthie, Enid, 72
Collins, Mr. (character), 164
Complete Duty of Man, 53 Eagleton, Terry, 64
conjugal rights, 158 Earnshaw, Catherine (character),
“Consistent Inconsistencies: The 114–115, 193
Transvestite Actress Madame Earnshaw, Mr. (character), 17
Vestris and Charlotte Brontë’s East India Company, 61
Shirley,” 172 Edgar (character), 64, 103, 117, 190,
Convenance et la Décence, 143 193–194, 196
Conyers, Norton, 159 Eliot, George, 101, 107, 162
Coriolanus, 105–106, 108–110 Elizabeth (character), 164
Coronation of Adrian Augustus Ellrington, Lady Zenobia
Wellesley First King of Angria, The, (character), 80
83, 86 Emanuel, M. Paul (character), 76,
courtship, 165 121–122, 127, 129–130, 135, 137,
Cowper, William, 26 139, 144, 148
Crawford, Henry (character), 104, England, 14, 77
106 Bristol, 15
Curran, Aemilia, 188 Cambridge, 48
Cythna (character), 186, 191 Cowan Bridge, 15
Harrogate, 16
Dante, 163, 165 Haworth, 26, 29
Dark Quartet: The Story of the Liverpool, 15, 20–21
Brontës, 104 London, 186
Davies, Stevie, 18, 188 Ripon, 159
Davison, Emily, 75 Scarborough, 26
Dean, Ellen, 17–18, 20 Sussex, 185
Dedlock, Lady Volumnia (character), Yorkshire, 122
107 Eoakes, Reg, 103
Desdemona (character), 21 Epipsychidion, 186–188, 190–191,
Désirée (character), 131–132 193
Dewsbury, 70 “Erost at Midnight,” 117
Dickens, Charles, 107, 181 Eton School, 186
Discourses of the Love of God, 52 Ewbank, Inga-Stina, 111
divorce, 158 Examiner, The, 105
Dobell, Sydney, 110 Eyre, Jane (character), 14, 35, 38,
Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, 40–41, 43–44, 46, 48, 51, 56, 74,
158 78, 149, 167–168, 170, 172, 180
214 Index
Faderman, Lillian, 179 Goldsmith, Oliver, 106

Family Shakespeare, The, 105 Gondal (fictional location), 17,
Fanshawe, Ginevra (character), 77, 26–28, 30
125, 134, 138–139, 147 Goneril (character), 114
Faucit, Helena, 105 Goon Show, The, 85
Fedon (slave leader), 17 Gordon, Felicia, 36
Felix Holt, 107 Gothic Fictions: Prohibition,
Feminism, 64, 118 Trangression, 79
Fermi, Sarah, 16 Graham, Kenneth W., 79
Feste (character), 112 Greene, Nick, 102
Fingersmith, 179 Greenwood, Frederick, 16
Folger Shakespeare Library, 104 Greenwood, John, 16
Forster, E. M., 194 Greenwood, Robin, 16
Forster, John, 105, 109 Grimalkin (fictional cat), 115
Foucault, Michel, 171 Gubar, Susan, 26, 64, 111
Foundling, The, 81, 90 Guinevere (character), 163
Fox, Charles James, 158
Foyster, Elizabeth, 175
Hamlet (slave), 17
Frankenstein, 186
Hamlet, 106, 114
Frasers Magazine, 188
Hancock, Tony, 85
French Romantics, 72
Hannibal (slave), 17, 109
Frost, Miss (character), 122
Hardy, Thomas, 114
Hareton (character), 18, 20, 114,
Garden of Eden, 40
116–117, 196
Gaskell, Mrs. Elizabeth, 68, 101,
Hargrave (character), 94
121, 149, 167, 172
Genesis of Wuthering Heights, The, Harrison, Ada, 27
189 Hartford, Amelia (character), 86
Genii (character), 81–82, 84 Hartford, Sir Edward (character), 86
Georgette (character), 132 Hastings, Lord (character), 118
Georgian Underworld (series), 171 Hatfield, W. C., 79
Gérin, Winifred, 172, 187 Hattersley, Arthur (character), 94
Gilbert, Sandra M., 26, 64, 94, 111 Haworth Parsonage, 15, 52, 68–69,
Gill, Mrs. (character), 178 73, 77, 79, 101, 103, 134
Gimmerton (fictional location), 112 Hazlitt, William, 105, 107
Glasstown (fictional location), 116, Heathcliff, Linton (character), 13,
167 15, 17–21, 63–64, 110–117, 189–
Glasstown Confederacy, 80, 83, 85 191, 193–196
globalisation, 63 Heger, Monsieur and Madame, 67,
Gnasher (fictional dog), 114 70–71, 73, 78, 122
God, 33, 39, 46, 51, 165 Heger, Monsieur Constantin, 16, 68,
Godwin, William, 186 123, 148
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 164 Heger, Zoë, 123, 149
Index 215
Helstone, Caroline (character), 107, Jameson, Anna, 105

109–110, 171, 175 Jane Eyre, 13, 17, 21, 35–56, 74, 76,
Helstone, Rev. (character), 174 87, 102, 110, 121, 149–150, 162,
Henry VIII, 104, 106 164, 166–167, 169, 174, 191
Hermione (character), 105 Jenkins, Reverend David, 70
Hewish, John, 187, 188 Jenkins. Mrs., 70
Hindley (character), 18–19, 114, Joseph (character), 19, 111
116–117 Jude the Obscure, 194
Hinduism, 55 Julius Caesar, 106, 109
Holmes, Richard, 187 Jupiter (slave), 17
Home, Mr. (character), 133 Justine Marie (character), 134
Home, Paulina (character), 129, 131,
147 Kate (character), 114
Home, Polly (character), 132 Kean, Edmund, 105
homosexuality, 171–181 Keats, John, 107
Horace, 102 Keeldar, Shirley (character), 110,
House of Commons, 61
174–175, 177
Hughes, Glyn, 172
Keighley Mechanics Institute, 70
Huntingdon, Arthur (character),
Kemble, John Philip, 109
157, 159
Kettle, Arnold, 64, 193
Huntington, Helen (character),
Kim, Jin-Ok, 176
91–99, 157, 159
King Lear, 103, 105, 111, 114
Knightley, Kiera, 162
Iago (character), 111
imperishable empire, 62
Labassecouriens (character), 131, 137
incest, 186
Lake Windermere, 16
India, 35, 61, 63
English education in, 61 Lally, Mr. (character), 174
literature of, 62 Lancelot (character), 163
Indian Penal Code, 61, 63 Laon (character), 19, 186
Infant Custody Act of 1838, 159 Laon and Cythna, 186, 191
Ingram, Mrs. Blanche (character), La Terrasse, 138
168, 172 Law Hill School, 172–173
International Monetary Fund, 63 Lawrence, D. H., 63
Introduction to the English Novel, 193 Lawton, Marianna (character), 176
Ireland, 186 Lear, King (character), 114
Island of Antigus, Brief Account, 15 Leavis, Q. D., 64, 193
Isolde (character), 163 Lectures on Dramatic Art and
Literature, 105
Jamaica, 14, 21 Leeds Mercury, 173
Kingston, 20 Leonato (character), 113
Spanish Town, 16, 20 Leontes (character), 106, 108, 112
Jamaica (slave), 17 Lesbianism, 171–181
216 Index
Letter on the Abolition of the Slave Markham, Gilbert (character), 98

Trade addressed to the Freeholders marriage, 165, 168
and other Inhabitants of Yorkshire, love as basis of, 163
A, 15 Married Womens Property Act, 159
Letters from an Englishman, 82, 83 Mask of Anarchy, The, 186
Lewes, George Henry, 162 Mason, Bertha (character), 14
Liddington, Jill, 172–174 Mason, Mr. (character), 14, 20
Life of Charlotte Brontë, 121, 149, 172 Maxwell, Aunt (character), 91–92, 96
Life of Sir Walter Scott, 15, 104 McKinnan, Daniel, 15
Life of William Wilberforce, 15 Melbourne, Lord, 159
Linton, Catherine (character), 113 Messianism, 53
Linton, Edgar (character), 111, 113 Meyer, Susan, 15
Linton, Isabella (character), 18 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A, 112
Lister, Anne, 171–174, 176–181 Milicent (character), 91, 93–94,
Liverpool, 88–90 96–98
Lockhart, John Gibson, 15 Mill, John Stuart, 75
Lockwood, Mr. (character), 112–115, Miller, Elaine, 174
117, 196 Miller, Lucasta, 148
London, 68, 93 Milton, John, 104, 106
Lonoff, Sue, 123 Milton’s Eve, 178
Lord Wharton Bible, 104 Mingo (slave), 17
Love’s Labours Lost, 113 “Minute on Indian Education,” 61
Lowood School, 21 “Mirth and Mourning,” 30
Luddite rebellions, 107 miscegenation, 21
Lydia (character), 164 Monty Python, 85
Moore, Gerard (character), 174
Macaulay, Thomas Babington, Moore, Hortense (character), 107
61–63 Moore, Lisa, 178
Macbeth, 103, 106, 109, 111, 114–115 Moore, Robert (character), 107, 109,
Macbeth (character), 103, 105 176
Macbeth, Lady (character), 103, 110, Moore, Thomas, 26
115 Moore, Tom, 187
MacFarsin, Mr. (character), 54 Moors, 68
Mackay, Angus, 110 Moral Sketches, 134
Macready, William Charles, 105– More, Hannah, 134
106, 109 Moses (slave), 17
Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Mr. Ashworth & Son, 80
Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Much Ado About Nothing, 113
Literary Imagination, The, 64, 111 My Angria and the Angrians, 90
Maid of Killarney, The, 54 Myer, Valerie Grosvenor, 123
Mann, Miss (character), 176
Mansfield Park, 104, 106 Nabokov, Vladimir, 85
Marianna (character), 175 Nanny (character), 54
Index 217
Narcissus, 191 Peters, Maureen, 172

“Narrow Way, The,” 32 Pilate, Pontius, 39, 51
Nelly (character), 17, 19, 112–113, Pinion, F. B., 15
116, 118, 195–196 Pisa, Italy, 186
Nestor, Pauline, 147, 179 poetry, 25–33
New Year’s Story, A, 83, 85 Pollard, Arthur, 36
New Yorker, The, 62, 162 Polly (character), 131
New Zealand, 70 Ponden Hall, 53, 105
Nicholls, Arthur, 174 Ponden House, 15–16
“No Coward Soul is Mine,” 189 Poole, Adrian, 114
Northangerland, Alexander Percy, Pope, Alexander, 106
80–81, 83–85, 87–90 Postlethwaite, 16
Norton, Caroline, 159 Prescott, Joseph, 45
Norton, Ralph, 159 Price, Fanny (character), 104
Novy, Marianne, 106, 110 Pride and Prejudice, 162, 164
Nunnwood (fictional location), Pride and Prejudice (movie), 162, 166,
177 169
Nussey, Ellen, 16, 69–70, 106, 108, Priestley, Mrs., 177
173 Professor, The, 17, 73, 76, 81, 85, 88,
123, 149
Octavia (character), 116 Prometheus Unbound, 186
Ode to the West Wind, 186, 188 Promised Land, 71
Ontario, 79 property rights, 157
Orr, Danielle, 180 Prospero (character), 116–117
Orsino (character), 112
Othello, 21 Quamina (slave leader and black
Othello (character), 105 deacon), 17
Oxford Companion to the Brontës, The, Quarterly Review, 15
123 Quashia (character), 80
Oxford English Dictionary, 179 Queen Mab, 186
Queen Victoria, 14, 106
Pamela (character), 167 “Queer as 18th Century Folk”
Pamela, 166–167 (documentary), 171
Paradise Lost, 104
Parliament, 15 racism, 62
Patchett, Elizabeth, 172 Reed, Mrs., 21
Patmore, Coventry, 165 Regan (character), 114
Paul et Virginie (ship), 16 republicanism, 186
Paulina (character), 108 Reuter, Zoraïde (character), 123, 149
Peck, G. W., 110 Review of English Studies, The, 196
Pensionnat de Demoiselles, 70 Revolt of Islam, The, 186
Pensionnat Heger, 70, 76 Richard III, 106, 118
Persuasion, 164 Richardson, Samuel, 166–167
218 Index
Rivers, St. John (character), 35, 37, Shylock (character), 111

45, 47–48, 55–56, 110, 168 Sicilia, King of (character), 108
Rivers, St. Paul, 43 Sidgwick, Mrs. John Benson, 16
Robinson, Mrs., 26 Silas, Père (character), 144–145
Robinson family, 26 Sinclair, May, 13, 20
Rochester, Edward (character), 14, slavery, 13–21
20, 35–36, 38–41, 43–46, 49–50, Smith, Elder and Co., 75
56, 74, 78, 121, 167–169, 174 Smith, George, 77
Roe Head School, 69, 71 Smith, Margaret, 16, 44
Roman Catholic Church, 77 Snowe, Lucy (character), 76, 78,
Romantic era, 164 121–123, 125–136, 138, 140,
Romanticism, 164 142–143, 145–170, 174
Gothic, 166 Song of Solomon, 41
Romantic, 107, 168 Sorrows of Young Werther, The, 164
love, 162–163 Southey, Robert, 16, 69, 106
poets, 190 St. John, 37
writers, 26 St. Johns College, Cambridge, 15
Room of One’s Own, A, 101, 103, 111 St. Pierre, Bernardin de, 16
Rosamond (character), 55 Stanford, Derek, 27
Rue d’Isabelle, 70–71, 73 Staniforth, Samuel, 16
Rushdie, Salman, 62 Staniforth, Thomas, 16
Stanley, Lord (character), 118
Sabia, Marina (character), 27 Stephen (Christian martyr), 51
Sand, George, 70 Stephen, Leslie, 72, 179
Schlegel, Wilhelm, 105 Storrs Hall, 16
Scotland, 15 Swarcliffe Hall, 16
Scott, Walter, 105, 107 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 110
Sect, Clapham, 53
Tallii (character), 116
seduction, 166
Taming of the Shrew, The, 113
“Self-Communion,” 31–32 Tate, Nahum, 105
“Severed and Gone,” 31 Taylor, James, 180
sexuality, 165, 170 Taylor, Mary, 69–70
sexual jealousy, 141 Tempest, The, 116
Shakespeare, William, 63, 101–118, Tenant of Wildfell Hall, The, 91, 99,
137 157–159
Shakespeare’s Women, 105 Thackeray, William Makepeace, 181
Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft The Arabian Night, 81
Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, 105
Godwin, 186, 188, 192, 194–195
Thompson, William “Abednego”, 15
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 26, 185 Thomson, James, 106
Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 159 Thormählen, Marianne, 35, 37, 145
Shibden Hall, 172–174 Thornfield (fictional location), 14,
Shirley, 70, 73, 104, 106, 110, 118, 20, 41, 45
171, 181 Three Brontës, The, 13
Index 219
Thrushcross Grange, 19, 111–112, Werther, Young (character), 164

173 Westbrook, Eliza, 186
Times, The, 149 Westbrook, Harriet, 186
Tipping the Velvet, 179 West Indies, 16, 20
Tour through British West Indies, A, 15 Westminster Review, 110
transvestism, 181
Whigs, 159
Tristan (character), 163
Tuffman, John, 15 Whitbread, Helen, 180
Twelfth Night, 112–113 “Why ask to know the date, the
clime?,” 188
Vanskike, Elliot, 172 Wickham (character), 164
Varens, Celine, 20 Wilberforce, William, 15, 20
Veil of the Temple, 43 Williams, Judith, 35
Venn, Eling, 53 Wilson, John, 16
Venn, Henry, 53 Winnifrith, Tom, 187
Venn, John, 53 Winter’s Tale, The, 106, 108, 112
Vestris, Madame, 173 Wolf (fictional dog), 114
Victorian literature, 68 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 163, 165, 186
View of the English Stage, A, 105 women, 101
Villette, 16, 67, 73, 75–78, 121–123, status of, 159
129, 148–150, 167, 174 womens rights movement, 159
Viola (character), 112 Wood, G. Bernard, 16
Violence, 18 Woodhouse, G. W., 52
Virgil, 102 Wooler, Margaret, 105
Virgin Mary, 50 Woolf, Virginia, 72, 101–103, 110–
Visick, Mary, 189 111, 118, 165
Vita Nuova, 163 Wordsworth, William, 16, 26, 106
Viviani, Emilia, 186, 188, 190–192 World Bank, 63
“Voice from the Dungeon, A,” 27 Wright, D.D, Rev. W. D., 88
Wuthering Heights, 13, 17, 19–21,
Wales, 15 63–64, 76, 79, 86–87, 102, 104,
Walker, Ann, 171–172, 175–176 110–112, 114–116, 118, 173,
Walravens, Madame (character), 137 185–189, 191–196
Waters, Sarah, 179–180
Watson, Melvin R., 111 “Yes Thou Art Gone,” 29
Watts, Isaac, 52 Yorkshire, 15, 68, 73–74, 77, 79
“Weep Not Too Much, My Beverley, 67
Darling,” 30
Weightman, William, 28–29 Zamorna, Arthur (character), 74,
Wellesley, Lord Charles Albert 80–82, 85
Florian, 89 Zenobia, Alexandrina (character), 28
Wellington, Duke of, 109 Zerona (character), 30

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Bloom’s Modern Critical Views

African-American George Orwell Miguel de Cervantes

Edited and with an introduction by

Bloom’s Modern Critical Views: The Brontës—New Edition

Introduction ©2009 by Harold Bloom

Bloom’s Literary Criticism

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The Brontës / edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom.—New ed.

Cover design by Ben Peterson

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Editor’s Note vii

Slavery: Idée Fixe of Emily and Charlotte Brontë 13

“Escaping the body’s gaol”: The Poetry of Anne Bronte 25

“Almost my hope of heaven”: Idolatry and Messianic

Macauley’s “Imperishable Empire” and “Nelly, I Am

Monsieur Heger: Critic or Catalyst

The Brontës: Gothic Transgressor as Cattle Drover 79

Abuse, Silence, and Solitude in

Shakespeare and the Brontës 101

In Defence of Madame Beck 121

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall: What Anne Brontë

Charlotte Brontë, Jane Austen,

Anne Lister and Lesbian Desire

“Addresses from the Land

My Introduction considers Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights as northern

T he three Brontë sisters—Charlotte, Emily Jane, and Anne—are unique

Byron died his more-or-less heroic death at Missolonghi in Greece on April

The Byronism of Rochester in Jane Eyre is enhanced because the narrative

Mr. Rochester has a thoughtful nature and a very feeling heart; he

Poor Rochester! If that constituted an accurate critical summary, then who

It seems not to have been primarily the coarseness and sexuality of

Byronic passion, being an ambiguous entity, is legitimately present in

sad—because he claimed these services without painful shame

What are we to make of Charlotte Brontë’s strenuous literalization of Gen.

Wuthering Heights is as unique and idiosyncratic a narrative as Moby-Dick, and

No coward soul is mine

O God within my breast

Vain are the thousand creeds

To waken doubt in one

With wide-embracing love

Though Earth and moon were gone

There is not room for Death

We could hardly envision Catherine Earnshaw, let alone Heathcliff, chant-

It is a fiend of a book, an incredible monster, combining all the

rigg. The action is laid in Hell,—only it seems places and people

Mrs. Brownrigg was a notorious eighteenth-century sadistic and murderous

Much later, in a Yorkshire village, the spirit of romanticism bore a

“Oh, you see, Nelly! he would not relent a moment, to keep me

Whatever we are to call the mutual passion of Catherine and Heathcliff, it

Often rebuked, yet always back returning

To-day, I will seek not the shadowy region;

I’ll walk, but not in old heroic traces,

I’ll walk where any own nature would be leading:

What have those lonely mountains worth revealing?

Whatever that centering is, it is purely individual, and as beyond gender as