Erin Blakemore - The Heroine's Bookshelf - Life Lessons, from Jane Austen to Laura Ingalls Wilder

The story of how this plain, poor writer created one of the greatest literary triumphs in the English language is as much about steadfastness as it is about grief. Charlotte’s journey from impotence to immortality started in the damp parsonage at Haworth in harsh northern England, where she lived in the company of her eccentric, literary siblings and a distracted father. The wild, unfettered moors were the perfect place for the awkward Brontës, who spent more time wandering through nature and stomping through their tiny living room than associating with their father’s congregation. Isolated, soggy, and freezing cold, the house overlooked a graveyard where, in time, nearly everyone who had ever been close to Charlotte would lie buried.

The motherless Brontë girls enjoyed an unusual degree of education at the hands of their gruff curate father, Patrick, who had taken over their upbringing after Maria Brontë's long, slow death from uterine cancer in 1821. Still, as they grew up, the sisters bumped up against the twin barriers of cultural convention and social standing. Poor and lacking in looks and connections, Charlotte was forced to make her way in a world that didn’t think much of feminine ability. The results were less than encouraging. Her forays into the world of governessing and teaching flopped. Every time she forged a path away from Haworth, desperate to make a living, she was forced back home when the money ran out and the well of her employers’ goodwill ran dry. Deprived of outside stimulus, Charlotte was continually thwarted by disease, lack of funds, and family emergencies. Though she clung to her sisters in the years that followed, she began to turn inward for solace.

When faced with the vagaries of a world they never cared much to understand, the Brontës wrote. Together with her brother, Branwell, and sisters Emily and Anne, Charlotte was obsessed with violent struggles in imaginary kingdoms throughout her childhood and adolescence. Huddled around the fire of the parsonage, the siblings wrote epic poems and long sagas. But it was the first real personal crisis of her life that prompted Charlotte to write for herself, by herself.

In retrospect, it’s amazing that Charlotte had a chance for any kind of failed love at all, obscured as she was by the isolation of Haworth and the lowliness of her own social standing. Still, she managed to fall in love during her year at a boarding school in Brussels… and to be deeply wounded when her passion for a married man was first ignored, then roundly rejected. The trip to Brussels was an experiment intended to arm Charlotte with the tools she’d need to open her own school for girls in England. But the expedition took an unexpected turn when she met Constantin Heger, the school’s headmaster. Sarcastic, dark, and gruff, Constantin challenged Charlotte’s brain as much as her willpower. That challenge lingered as she found herself at home again, depressed and lethargic, gripped with an emotion she hardly dared name.

She tried to distract herself with words, the panacea of her childhood and the only things to which she could entrust her adulterous emotions. At first she could not write at all. Even letters to Heger, whom she begged to contact her, came slowly. “I should not know this lethargy if I could write,” she complained. “Otherwise, do you know what I should do, Monsieur? I should write a book, and I should dedicate it to my literature master—to the only master I ever had—to you, Monsieur…. But that cannot be. It is not to be thought of. The career of letters is closed to me—only that of teaching is open.”

Depressed and listless, maddened by Heger’s nonre-sponse, Charlotte kept turning to her pen. Her struggles slowly unraveled themselves on paper, culminating in a love letter that bleeds with unrequited passion and stifled agony. “I strove to restrain my tears, to utter no complaint,” she wrote. “But when one does not complain, when one seeks to dominate oneself with a tyrant’s grip, the faculties start into rebellion and one pays for external calm with an internal struggle that is almost unbearable. Day and night I find neither rest nor peace. If I sleep I am disturbed by tormenting dreams in which I see you…. Monsieur, the poor have not need of much to sustain them… nor do I, either, need much affection from those I love…. But you showed me of yore a little interest… and I hold on to the maintenance of that little interest—I hold on to it as I would hold on to life.”

He never responded. The letter was later found, torn in pieces and meticulously pieced back together by Heger’s wife.

And this is where Charlotte’s steadfastness came in. Behind her lay what might have been her only chance at love. In front of her was a future full of bad weather and boredom. Deprived of her beloved professor and doomed to menial chores back at the parsonage, she began to write in earnest.

She wrote about love and deprivation. She wrote poems that blister with isolation and despair. She wrote her first novel. She even wrote one last letter to Heger. She wrote in the living room where she had spun fantastical tales as a child, surrounded by her sisters, who were avid readers and writers. Together, they shivered, worked, and read through the long, dark English winters, taking breaks to pace around the living room. Still, she kept her words to herself.

The orgy of writing that followed was no idyll. The family curse raised its head again as Branwell, once talented and precocious, slid further into the grips of laudanum addiction and alcoholism, humiliating the family with his repeated lapses into debt and his ranting, incoherent behavior. Meanwhile, Emily and Anne were placid and distracted, wrapped up in their own affairs.

Charlotte’s jump from literary secrecy to outright ambition was a happy accident. Sometime in late 1845, she picked up one of Emily’s notebooks. Idly, she began to read, forgetting that she had not asked permission to do so. What she saw electrified her. “Something more than surprise seized me,” she recalled later. “These were not common effusions, nor at all like the poetry women generally write.” Forced to confess her perfidy to her sisters, she found herself launching into a heartfelt argument for publication.

It took a while to convince Emily and Anne that publication was desirable or even possible, much less to overcome their scruples over Charlotte’s betrayal of Emily’s A. Anyone else would have given up. But Charlotte knew her sisters, and was convinced that the genius they could demonstrate in words should not lie in state at the parsonage forever. Slowly, she cracked through their reserve, tantalizing them—and herself—with visions of access to a world they could never conquer alone.

Armed with a small legacy from their deceased aunt and uncharacteristically optimistic about their prospects, the trio paid to publish their poems under a set of ambiguous pseudonyms. Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell appeared in May 1846. Encouraged by two positive reviews, the sisters hastened to mail off their first novels to their publisher. But their optimism was premature; despite early signs of promise, the book of poetry sold a grand total of two copies. Still, Charlotte didn’t give up.

The year that finally brought Charlotte into literary triumph and scandal would ultimately be overshadowed by a landscape of total personal devastation. Jane Eyre appeared in 1847, but Charlotte could barely devote any time to its growing popularity, the public’s obsession with its author’s secret identity, and the scathing assessments of its “unchristian” subject matter. As her book took on a life of its own, Charlotte’s own life was unraveling. Branwell drank himself to death in 1848. Her eccentric sisters followed soon after, succumbing to tuberculosis within three months of one another. Charlotte and her father were all alone.