It had always been noticed that several similar motives appeared in her novels; the love of a girl for her school master, a married man; an intense craving for affection; and pictures of sad partings. It was known that Charlotte had attended the school of M. Heger, a married man in Brussels, that she had left it and then returned, and later departed finally. There were critics who suspected that Charlotte was really in love with her teacher and that various scenes in her novels had their counterpart in reality. Among these were Sir Wemyss Reid, Augustine Birrel and Angus Mackay. But other critics scoffed at the idea. So great a Brontë student as Clement Shorter said it would be the act of treachery to pry into the writer's heart. May Sinclair, especially, repudiated with indignation the possibility that Brontë drew on actual facts for her novels; and her purposes in writing her The Three Brontës, was to demolish the theory that Charlotte Brontë was in love with M. Heger. But shortly after this work appeared there were published in 1913 in the London Times one of the "scoops" of the age, four pathetic heart burning love letters by Charlotte Brontë to M. Heger, written without pride, pleading for a little affection. The secret was out; there could be no doubt that the scenes of unrequited love in her novels were due to her own unreciprocated love for M. Heger and that Charlotte was Lucy Snowe and Jane Eyre in Villette and Jane Eyre, respectively. Miss Sinclair wrote an article attacking the publishing of the letters which had disproved her theory.
An excellent study of the influences of Charlotte's sad love affair on her work was made by Mrs. Ellis H. Chadwick in her In the Footsteps of the Brontës. It is really a psychoanalytical study, for it traces the novelist's work to her repressions. Another study has been promised by Lucille Dooley, who made several abstracts of psychoanalytical studies of genius from essays by Freud's disciples, in the American Journal of Psychology.
I just wish to point out a few of the influences of Brontë's love affair upon her work. Charlotte Brontë published Jane Eyre in October, 1847, and wrote in 1848: "Details, situations which I do not understand and cannot personally inspect, I would not for the world meddle with.... Besides not one feeling on any subject, public or private, will I ever affect that I do not really experience."
After she left Brussels on December 29, 1843, she wrote that she suffered much and that she would never forget what the parting cost her. This departure inspired the description of the flight from Thornfield (which is Brussels in Jane Eyre), the part of the novel which she told her biographer appealed to her most.
In her letters to Heger which were published she begs for sympathy as a beggar for crumbs from the table of the rich man. In the second letter written in 1844 she tells how she waited six months for a letter and she sent this one through friends. In Villette, in the twenty-fourth chapter, she wrote how Lucy Snowe studied to quench her madness because she received no letters. "My hour of torment was the post hour." She wrote that in all the land of Israel there was but one Saul, certainly but one David to soothe him. Heger was the David, she says symbolically, to soothe her. (In the novel Heger is called Paul Carl David Emanuel).
Villette is the most autobiographical of her novels. It appeared in the beginning of 1853 and had occupied the author the previous two years. It cost her great effort and she recalled in it the sleepless nights in Brussels about which she told Mrs. Gaskell; her anxieties were caused by her hopeless love for M. Heger. She knew that the novel would be recognised by the Hegers, and she printed in it a statement that the author reserved the rights of translation, as she feared M. Heger would read it if it were translated into French. She first had wanted to publish it anonymously. She also refused to make a happy ending which was wanted by the publishers; she would not have Paul and Lucy marry, for such was not the case in real life. (Jane Eyre, however, married Rochester.) The book is full of the Hegers, even their children being in it. Madame Heger does not figure in a favourable light, and one could hardly expect a girl to admire the wife of the man she loved herself.
The interval between the first and last of the letters published in the Times is about two years, which covers the saddest period of her life, the time she left Brussels finally on December 29th, 1843, and end of 1845. She had gone to Belgium originally in February, 1842; she was then twenty-six and Heger was seven years her senior. She left in November, 1842, when her aunt died, and returned in January, 1843. Heger wanted her to return and Charlotte was only too eager, though she could have received a better position. She describes this second trip in Villette. She left finally because Mme. Heger really did not want her services.
Charlotte's brother Branwell also fell in love with a married person, the wife of his employer.
Charlotte Brontë drew herself as a man in her first novel, The Professor. She calls herself William Crimsworth, who loves his teacher, Mlle. Reuter. The account she gives of the parting of the student with his teacher is again reminiscent of her memories of parting from M. Heger. She drew herself then just once in this rôle of the male lover.