“It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquility: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it.” — Charlotte Brontë

Charlotte Brontë was born on this day, in 1816. Here is perhaps the most famous image of the Brontë sisters, a portrait done by their dissipated brother Branwell:

I particularly love how Branwell painted over himself? Perhaps? What was he trying to do? Whatever it was, he did not succeed in X-ing himself out of the portrait of his famous writer sisters. He remains, a ghostly golden pillar, very strange, like so much about the Brontës is strange.

Jane Eyre is one of my forever books: it hooked me in young and never let me go. Its scope is vast and, again, very strange. Gothic melodrama runs through its veins, seeping out in the midst of the almost-Dickensian opening, the orphan, the horrid school, the deprivations and poverty, the dead children. And then moving into Mr. Rochester’s house, where his mad wife literally lives behind the walls, moaning in anguish. The book ends with the now-blinded Mr. Rochester calling out across the space-time continuum – literally – for his love, his Jane. She, having moved on (geographically, at least), hears his cry.

“Reader, I married him.”

One of the best closing lines of all time.

Cary Fukunaga’s film adaptation is fascinating and the closest – in my opinion – the real spooky power of the original. Although it skips Mr. Rochester cross-dressing to get intel about Jane’s feeling for him – from Jane herself. Wild! Mr. Rochester is WILD. Mr. Rochester is also not supposed to be gorgeous. HOWEVER. I appreciate the casting of Michael Fassbender because … if you’re a Jane Eyre person, if the book hooked you young, before you had your critical-thinking brain firmly in place, if you were a lonely teen, or a yearning Miss Lonelyhearts teen – then Mr. Rochester, in all his trapped torment, was the ultimate in Romantic. (Indeed, Jane Eyre, published in 1847, is on the tail-end of the Romantic movement, but clearly steeped in its influence.) And so casting a sexy handsome guy reflects the fantasy of the book, and I approve. I reviewed that version for Capital New York. I broke down Mia Wasikowska’s striking physicality in the lead role here.

Brontë poured her heart into her books. Unlike her sisters, she lived away from home for a long stretch of time. (Emily tried, but couldn’t bear it.) She worked for her living, and had a (failed) love affair. The wild godless belljar of Wuthering Heights comes from another universe. Emily’s solitary nature and self-reliance (“it vexes me to choose another guide” she wrote) vibrates in those upsetting pages, with Catherine and Heathcliff breathing adolescent self-involvement, deathly and single-minded, not at all touched by the real world or wide experience of a diverse array of humans. Wuthering Heights is disturbing in a way Jane Eyre is not. The books share a supernatural element, the ghostly hand knocking on the window in the opening sequences of Wuthering Heights, and the final sequence of Jane Eyre.

Charlotte was in awe of Emily. Emily was a titanic figure, a woman of immensely dominating personality – by all accounts. Charlotte was not. The sisters all wrote. They spent their childhood creating a massively complicated and intricate alternate universe. They lived in isolation (although, as Juliet Barker laid out in her definitive biography of the family, the isolation wasn’t as total as the myth of them suggests). Mrs. Elizabeth Gaskell, a family friend, wrote a biography of Charlotte, published in 1857, just two years after Charlotte died. She used Charlotte’s letters, excerpted at length and in full. (Because Charlotte lived away from home for a time, we have a ton of correspondence from her. Emily, who stayed at home, remains silent to us.) Gaskell’s book is a must-read for any Charlotte fan, and any fan of biography in general (the book has never been out of print. Astonishing. Most biographies have a shelf life. New trends come into play, new information is dug up, a reputation has to be looked at again and re-assessed). Mrs. Gaskell knew all of them and she puts you there.

The amount of tragedy endured by this family is not unique. In a time before modern medicine, and antibiotics (let’s hear it for science), people died of the common cold. I’m so glad we’re bringing back children dying of measles. Progress is for the birds. In Charlotte’s day, people died from the littlest things. You had no recourse, no way to fight things off. One after the other after the other, in quick succession, the Brontë siblings fell. Reading about it is harrowing.

I can’t say Charlotte’s books have always been a comfort to me. “Comfort” isn’t the right word. Her stuff is too unnerving. Her books stir the depths, and sometimes I wish the depths would remain unstirred. Yet I return to her work again and again (although I don’t know if I can bear to subject myself to Villette again. I didn’t read that one as a hopeful romantic teenager, like I read Jane Eyre. I read it as an adult, in a very difficult phase of my life. Villette was viscerally upsetting, which is obvious from this post.) I’m afraid to revisit. What I love most about her books is how much she still surprises me. Nothing can prepare you for Mr. Rochester. No matter how many times I have read Jane Eyre, he is still startling. The final chapter, involving astral travel or ESP through the ether, remains one of the most moving passages I have ever read.

Charlotte Brontë was a magnificent writer and it does her a great disservice to loop her in with Jane Austen (another writer I adore). They don’t even come from the same world. I only bring up Austen because the Brontës are often “looped together” with her – which I suppose is unavoidable albeit annoying: they were all women writing in the same period, when there weren’t too many women players on the board. Okay. But they are two completely different writers, with different styles and sensibilities. Austen lived a social life. Her books take place in heavily populated worlds, filled with gossip and leisure time. Children don’t die of malnutrition and cold in Austen;s novels. Charlotte’s writing has a messy, passionate, urgent PUSH to it, unique to her, and not present in Austen’s impeccable structure. Charlotte MUST get it out. Her writing sometimes trips over itself in its forward-momentum. She’s thrilling that way.

Her books do not become predictable with repetition. They elude capture. They sweep you up in their narrative, and you forget you know already how it ends.

QUOTES

Charlotte Bronte, letter to a friend who asked for a reading list:

“You ask me to recommend you some books for your perusal. I will do so in as few words as I can. If you like poetry, let it be first-rate; Milton, Shakespeare, Thomson, Goldsmith, Pope (if you will, though I don’t admire him), Scott, Byron, Campbell, Wordsworth, and Southey. Now 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 choose the good, and to avoid the evil; the finest passages are always the purest, the bad are invariably revolting; you will never wish to read them over twice. Omit the comedies of Shakespeare 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 VIII, from Richard III, from Macbeth, and Hamlet, and Julius Caesar. Scott’s sweet, wild, romantic poetry can do you no harm. Nor can Wordsworth’s, nor Campbell’s, nor Southey’s — the greatest part at least of his; some is certainly objectionable. For history, read Hume, Rollin, and the Universal History, if you can; I never did. For fiction, read Scott alone; all novels after his are worthless. For biography, read Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, Boswell’s Life of Johnson, Southey’s Life of Nelson, Lockhart’s Life of Burns, Moore’s Life of Sheridan, Moore’s Life of Byron, Wolfe’s Remains. For natural history, read Bewick and Audobon, and Goldsmith, and White’s History of Selborne. For divinity, your brother will advise you there. I can only say, adhere to standard authors, and avoid novelty.”

Charlotte Brontë:

“Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last. To pluck the mask from the face of the Pharisee is not to lift an impious hand to the Crown of Thorns.”

L.M. Montgomery, journal entry, after reading E.F. Benson’s biography of Charlotte Brontë:

I do not think Charlotte was in the least like the domineering little shrew he pictures her, anymore perhaps than she was like the rather too saintly heroine of Mrs. Gaskell’s biography. I do not put any faith in Beson’s theory that Branwell wrote parts of ‘Wuthering Heights’ and inspired the whole. There is no foundation in the world for it beyond the assertion of two of Branwell’s cronies that he read the first few chapters of it to them and told them it was his own. They may have been telling the truth, but I would not put the least confidence in any statement of Branwell’s. He was entirely capable of reading someone else’s manuscript and trying to pass it off as his own. No doubt he was more in Emily’s confidence than Charlotte ever knew and had got possession of her manuscript in some way. Benson blames Charlotte for her unsympathetic attitude to Branwell. I imagine that an angel would have found it rather difficult to be sympathetic. Benson cannot understand a proud sensitive woman’s heart. I love Charlotte Brontë so much that I am angry when anyone tries to belittle her. But I will admit that she seemed to have an unenviable talent for disliking almost everyone she met … And the things she says about the man she afterwards married!

William Makepeace Thackeray after reading Villette, 1835:

The poor little woman of genius! … I can read a great deal of her life as I fancy in her book, and see that rather than have fame … she wants some Tomkins or other to … be in love with.

Oh, stop it.

Michael Schmidt on the Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë in his Lives of the Poets:

The poems are often the fruit of their big gestures, their brimming hearts and earthquake heartbreaks. This does not mean the three women are a composite creature, what R.E. Pritchard calls a Brontësaurus. In their verse, though Emily is by far the best of the tree, there are differences of emotional intensity and of prosodic and formal skills. All three are gothicized Romantics. Their settings are often nocturnal, wintery – the long dark winters of the Yorkshire Moors around Haworth, where they were born and lived through a litany of bereavements (two elder sisters, their mother), and where they received their education and wrote tirelessly and voluminously. The weathers and settings reflect extreme states of mind and emotion and the forms are somber: balladic and hymn stanzas for the most part.

Charlotte Brontë:

Once indeed I was very poetical, when I was sixteen, seventeen, eighteen and nineteen years old – but I am now twenty-four approaching twenty-five – and the intermediate years are those which begin to rob life of its superfluous colouring.

L.M. Montgomery, journal:

It is customary to regret Charlotte Brontë’s death as premature. I doubt it. I doubt if she would have added to her literary fame. Resplendent as her genius was, it had a narrow range. I think she reached its limit. She could not have gone on forever writing ‘Jane Eyres’ and ‘Villette’s’ and there was nothing in her life and experience to fit her for writing anything else…

There was a marked masochistic strain in Charlotte Brontë — revealing itself mentally, not physically. This accounts for Rochester. He was exactly the tyrant a woman with such a strain in her would have loved, delighting in the pain he inflicted in on her. And this same tendency was the cause of her cruelty to Lucy Snowe — who was herself. She persecutes Lucy Snowe all through ‘Villette’ and drowns her lover rather than let the poor soul have a chance at happiness. I can’t forgive Charlotte Brontë for killing off Paul Emmanuel. I don’t know whether I like Lucy Snowe or not — but I am always consumed with pity for and sympathy with her, whereas Charlotte delights in tormenting her — a sort of spiritual vicarous self-flagellation.

Jeanette Winterson:

Who should the poet serve? Society or the Muse? This was a brand new question and not a happy one. If the woman poet could avoid it, the male poet and the prose writers of either sex could not. Of the great writers, Emily Brontë chose well. Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot continually equivocate and the equivocation helps to explain the uneven power of their work.

Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae:

The first novels of Emily and Charlotte Brontë, published the same year, revived out-of-fashion Gothic style. They share rugged, brooding heroes and a wild atmosphere of mystery and gloom. But the books belong to different genres. Despite sex-reversing moments, Charlotte’s Jane Eyre is a social novel governed by public principles of intelligibility. It records the worldly progress of an ingenue from childhood to maturity, culminating in marriage. Emily’s Wuthering Heights, on the other hand, is High Romantic, its sources of energy outside society and its sex and emotion incestuous and solipsistic. The two Brontë novels differ dramatically in their crossing lines of identification. Charlotte palpably projects herself into her underprivileged but finally triumphant heroine, while Emily leaps across the borderline of gener into her savage hero.

Charlotte Brontë:

Look twice before you leap.

L.M. Montgomery, journal entry:

Charlotte Brontë only made about 7,000 by her books … It seems unfair and unjust. What I admire most in Charlotte Brontë is her absolute clear-sightedness regarding shams and sentimentalities. Nothing of the sort could impose on her. And she always hewed straight to the line. I have been asking myself, ‘If I had known Charlotte Brontë in life – how would we have reacted upon each other? Would I have liked her? Would she have liked me?’ I answer, ‘No.’ She was absolutely without a sense of humor. She would not have approved of me at all. I could have done her whole heaps of good. A few jokes would have leavened the gloom and tragedy of that Haworth Parsonage amazingly.

People have spoken of Charlotte Brontë’s ‘creative genius’. Charlotte Brontë had no creative genius. Her genius was one of amazing ability to describe and interpret the people and surroundings she knew. All the people in her books who impress us with such a wonderful sense of reality were drawn from life. She herself is Jane Eyre, Lucy Snowe. Emily was Shirley. Rochester, whom she did create, was unnatural and unreal. Blanche Ingram was unreal. St. John was unreal. Most of her men are unreal. She knew nothing of men except her father and brother and the Belgian professor of her intense unhappy love. Emmanuel was drawn from him, and therefore is one of the few men in her books who is real.

Here are the opening paragraphs of Jane Eyre:

There was no possibility of taking a walk that day. We had been wandering, indeed, in the leafless shrubbery an hour in the morning; but since dinner (Mrs. Reed, when there was no company, dined early) the cold winter wind had brought with it clouds so sombre, and a rain so penetrating, that further out-door exercise was now out of the question.

I was glad of it: I never liked long walks, especially on chilly afternoons: dreadful to me was the coming home in the raw twilight, with nipped fingers and toes, and a heart saddened by the chidings of Bessie, the nurse, and humbled by the consciousness of my physical inferiority to Eliza, John, and Georgiana Reed.