"The principal male characters," says Mrs. Chadwick, "to be found in Charlotte Brontë's great novels were those drawn from M. Heger, M. Pelet, Rochester, Robert Moore, Louis Moore and Paul Emanuel."
Hence we may conclude as a rule that when a motive appears often, or a note persists continuously, in a writer's work, there were reasons therefor in his personal life. Charlotte Brontë was no exception to the rule.
She married in 1854 but did not really love her husband. Poor Charlotte Brontë! She married late and not for love, and all her youth she craved love and wanted to marry and be a mother. She betrays herself in a dream reported in the twenty-first chapter of Jane Eyre. Had she known that dreams are realised unconscious wishes she might never have recounted this dream, a frequent one among women, both married and unmarried, who have no children.
"During the past week scarcely a night had gone over my couch that had not brought with it a dream of an infant, which I sometimes hushed in my arms, sometimes dandled on my knee, sometimes watched playing with daisies on a lawn, or, again, dabbling its hands in running water. It was wailing this night and laughing the next; now it nestled close to me, and now it ran from me; but whatever mood the apparition evinced, whatever aspect it wore, it failed not for seven successive nights to meet me the moment I entered the land of slumber."
Literature can scarcely present a more personal confession in disguised form. That dream of Jane Eyre's was Charlotte Brontë's, who wanted to have children by M. Heger.
III
The value of the study of an author's works in connection with his life is also seen in the case of Dickens. An excellent book by Edwin Pugh, Charles Dickens Originals, really applies the psychoanalytic method, to a large extent, to Dickens's work.
Some of the main influences in Dickens's life and work were due to two girls, Maria Beadnell, his boyhood sweetheart, who rejected him, and Mary Hogarth, his wife's sister, who died young. These women were respectively the models of Dora in David Copperfield, and Little Nell.
The story of Dickens's early love became known a half dozen years ago when his letters to Miss Beadnell were published. He was eighteen when he loved her, and when she finally rejected him he wrote to her saying he could never love another. Not long afterwards he married. In 1855, when he was nearly forty-four years old, he said in a letter to his future biographer, Forster, that he could never open David Copperfield "without going wandering away over the ashes of all that youth and hope, in the wildest manner." He was thinking of his love for Maria, for the reference in the letter is to Dora, of whom Maria was the prototype. She also appears as Dolly Varden in Barnaby Rudge. He again draws her in Estella in Great Expectations, and describes the sufferings that Pip, who is himself, had undergone on account of her.