CHARLOTTE BRONTE

Press, Volume LXXXIX, Issue 27035, 9 May 1953, Page 3

CHARLOTTE BRONTE

A “FOOTNOTE” TO MRS GASKELL [Reviewed by H.L.G.I The Bronte Story. A reconsideration of Mrs Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Bronte. By Margaret Lane. Illustrated by Joan Hassall. William Heinemann. 284 pp.

Margaret Lane’s idea of basing her biography of Charlotte Bronte on Mrs Gaskell’s “Life of Charlotte Bronte” has a double appeal. It not only allows her to present an authoritative account of Charlotte (and the whole brilliant and fascinating Bronte family) which represents the fruit of all modern Bronte scholarship, but also provides ‘ the opportunity for a sympathetic re-examination of the problems Mrs Gaskell faced when she set about writing their story. Many accusations have been levelled against Mrs Gaskell; she has been held guilty of timid suppressions on the one hand and libellous falsifications of character on the other. But Margaret Lane demonstrates the delicate nature of her difficulties, with Mr Bronte and Arthur Nicholls (Charlotte's husband) still living, and sets right whatever bias or omissions there were in her portraits of the family, at the same time fully vindicating Mrs Gaskell’s courage and integrity and re-emphasising the fact that her work is a masterpiece. Her method necessarily involves much quotation,from Mrs Gaskell (these quotations are indented and marked with a distinctive sign), but she has interwoven the two narratives into a most readable and dramatic whole. Her own spirited and clear prose is a fit match for Mrs Gaskell’s direct and vigorous writing. The chief contrast is in the conception of character: in the twentieth century, as Margaret' Lane observes, “we ask questions and detect motives to which Mrs Gaskell and her contemporaries would have been deaf and blind.”

Mrs Gaskell’s character-sketch of the Rev. Patrick Bronte emerges as having been rather recklessly over-drama-tised; she unconsciously selected her evidence to create a legend of Charlotte Bronte’s father as an irascible and domineering eccentric that has more poetic than actual truth to it. His actual nature is better shown by his tolerant protest of some of her anecdotes after the publication of the life:—

I do not deny that I am somewhat eccentrick. Had I been numbered amongst the calm, sedate, concentric men of the world, I should not have been as I now am, and I should In all probability never have had such children as mine have been. . . . Only don’t set me on in my fury to burning hearthrugs, sawing the backs of chairs, and tearing my wife’s silk gowns.

If Mrs Gaskell’s portrait of Mr Bronte provoked some controversy when the biography first appeared, it was mild compared to the storm aroused by her description of the Clergy Daughters’ School at Cowan Bridge to which Mr Bronte sent his four eldest daughters in 1824. Here Maria and Elizabeth sickened, and died after leaving the* school; it was the original of “Lowood,” the school so bitterly described by Charlotte in “Jane Eyre.” In this case, Margaret Lane supports Mrs Gaskell’s accounts of the school, which she went to great pains to investigate scrupulously. The conditions at the school do appear to have been, as she says, “horrible enough.” The most significant omission in Mrs Gaskell’s portrait of the Bronte children is the result of her failure to find any importance in the volumes of tiny manuscripts that Charlotte. Branwell, Emily and Anne wrote from 1829 onwards. Written in microscopic script, these were only, to Mrs Gaskell, curious proof of an early rage for literary composition. She did not even bother to transcribe more than a fragment of this copious literature. But a modern American scholar hag transcribed it all, and modern interpreters find it highly significant—much more than incomprehensible childish rubbish —and of great psychological interest:—

What was extraordinary about the Brontes’ games was that they produced an extensive and precocious literature, and, as the children grew up. provided a fantasy world which for all of them, at various times, became a substitute for life. The mature work of Charlotte and Emily cannot be fully understood without some knowledge of the play sagas of their childhood, and the violent, longdrawn, uninhibited daydream life to which these gave rise. To sensitive natures dismayed by life ... and it seems that the four of them were all, for different reasons, so dismayed—there is great comfort and great danger in the possession of an absorbing daydream in which to hide one’s head.

Margaret Lane describes how Emily Bronte later completely rejected actual life and lived entirely in her own imaginative life; how Branwell ißadult life, substituted alcohol and opium for the obsessive daydreams of their childhood, and how Charlotte—efter many years of painful struggle—was the only one who broke completely away from them. The disgrace of Branwell provided Mrs Gaskell with one of her most delicate problems. It could not be omitted because it was already known to many. She took Branwell’s side in the sordid story of his love-affair with Mrs Robinson and wrote about it in melodramatic terms, full of Victorian indignation against “the profligate woman." Modern scholarship, as Margaret Lane sums it up, is more cautious and detached, and admits that the truth is unlikely now to be discovered. Branwell’s early brilliance and promise came, at any rate, to a very sad ending; his was the tragedy of an only son from whom too much was expected. There was, however, on« episode in the Bronte story which Mrs Gaskell

could, and did, omit. That was the unhappy love of Charlotte for Mr Heger, her teacher in Brussels, whom she described in “Villette.” Margaret Lane, well understanding Mrs Gaskell’s discretion, tells the full and touching story, which is so important to an understanding of Charlotte’s mature lifei Her analysis of Mr Heger as the kind of teacher whose success in teaching depends upon establishing an emotional rapport between himself and his pupil is thoroughly convincing and written with the subtle insight that distinguishes all her portraits. Charlotte readily responded to Mr Heger’s methods, but Emily, with her deep reserve, was totally unmoved. Mrs Gaskell was not attracted to Emily, but Margaret Lane’s interpretation of her often harsh' and “farouche” nature and her genius (which modern criticism places higher than Charlotte’s) does her full justice. The fascination and drama in the lives of the Brontes have never been more potent than in this book. As it nears its end and reaches the series of deaths which took off all his gifted children and left Mr Bronte alone in Haworth Parsonage, no reader can fail to be deeply moved. And Margaret Lane’s supplement to Mrs .Gaskell’s story makes Charlotte’s final years the more moving, since she is able to convey (from Charlotte’s letters to her friend Ellen Nussey) the sudden and surprising happiness which Charlotte found in her marriage to the Rev. Mr Nicholls—a matter which Mrs Gaskell’s delicacy forbade her to do more than hint at. After less than a year of marriage, when she was pregnant with her first child, Charlotte too succumbed to the disease which carried off all six of Mr Bronte’s children. Not least of the attractions of this original and excellent book, which its author modestly describes as “a sort of footnote to Mrs Gaskell,” is the elegance of its production and the charming illustrations of Joan Hassall at the head and foot of each chapter. They are based on a thorough knowledge of the period, the'places and the people involved and a complete understanding of the text With the aid of these drawings, Margaret Lane has been able to recreate the spirit of the Brontes. She has told their full story, and her work gathers together and supersedes all that has been written in the century since Mrs Gaskell.