The Fantasy Worlds of the Brontes

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32252, 21 March 1970, Page 4

The Fantasy Worlds of the Brontes

The Brontes’ Secret By Charlotte Maurat. Constable. 271 pp. Index. Appendices. Illustrated. Charlotte, Branwell, Emily and Anne

Bronte's secret has been known for a good many years now, although the force of it has not made a significant part of their biography before. Charlotte Maurat’s delightful chronicle, translated from the French by Margaret Meldrum, leads the reader along the paths of family history with almost as much force as “Wuthering Heights” itself. The author is sympathetic not only to the Brontes’ novels and poems, but also to the beauty and bleakness of the Yorkshire moors. The jacket shows a black-and-white sweep of moors with sheep and a dilapidated farmhouse, and the frontispiece is a memorably gloomy photograph of Haworth parsonage taken from the graveyard, with graves looming large: quite the opposite of the

modern tourist postcard of the sunny front of the house!

The author thus deteirmines to come to grips with the major influences in her subjects’ environment: death, their father and themselves, and a village and moorland landscape. It was probably the deaths of their mother and their elder sisters that fostered in the Bronte children a self-sufficiency and a shared, introspective spiritual life. This inner life was their secret. Imagining a fantasy world called Angria, Charlotte and Branwell as children began writing its chronicles: they became the Earl of Northangerland and his wife Lady Zenobia. and the Duke and Duchess of Zamoma, and began leading a double life. The younger sisters. Emily and Anne, did likewise, with the Kingdom of Gondal becoming their special province.

It is not uncommon for children to create a fantasy world which can become so important as to overshadow the everyday realities of life.: but it is less common for them to write coherent narratives of fantasy experiences: and the Brontes may be unique in carrying their childhood creation into adulthood. Emily and Anne's best poems have their context in the world of Gondal, whose strange place-names were altered before publication: but they would not agree to the more powerful' of them being published in their lifetime. Branwell’s childhood brilliance, well attested

by the author from the evidence ot his “Juvenilia”, did not lead to the successful career his father had hoped: from the life of Gondal his excitable temperament led him to drink and drugs, and he died after increasing bouts of delirium. But he was not, as the earlier biographer Mrs Gaskell had thought, the model for the violent Heathcliff; the nature of romantic characters such as him had been explored earlier by the novelists in their juvenile chronicles. Charlotte, eldest, longest lived and most substantial novelist of the three, is really the main subject of this biography, and she is treated sympathetically. Her letters are the main source of information. Of particular interest is Charlotte Maurat’s account of the time she spent as a student and teacher in Brussels, some of the time accompanied

by her sister Emily. Here she formed an important friendship with Mr Heger, her teacher, which he, urged by his wife, discontinued after she returned to Yorkshire. His unnecessary callousness caused her much suffering. Her marriage to the Rev. Arthur Bell Nicholls, and her death of starvation caused by an inability to retain food, bring the Brontes’ story to a close. This book can be recommended for the biographer’s pleasantly unobtrusive manner of presentation, and for the sympathy with which she discusses Charlotte Bronte.