We now, sixty years after, find by aid of the many discoveries I have made and present my readers in the pages of this, The Key to the Brontë Works, that Charlotte Brontë, penning in her connective works the story of her life, gave us the spectacle of a living drama wherein she was herself a leading actor. Herein we see the imperfections and shortcomings of human nature, and Charlotte Brontë herself is shown standing in the slippery places. Before our eyes flits the procession of the people who moved about her, and the air is filled with the atmosphere through which her genius saw the world. In this new light of revelation we perceive her great message is—the Martyrdom of Virtue. A more poignant message I know not! And Charlotte Brontë was martyr in this moving drama—nay, I believe there also was another. Spending two years at a Brussels pensionnat she gained the friendship of Monsieur Héger, a devout Roman Catholic and a man of intellect who, himself once a teacher at the establishment, as was M. Pelet in The Professor at a similar school, came to marry the mistress. Miss Brontë went twice to Brussels, on the first occasion being accompanied by her sister Emily. Finally, Charlotte Brontë left Brussels abruptly on account, it has been said, of the harsh attitude of Madame Héger, who even forbade her husband to correspond with Miss Brontë. Concerning this period and the incidents associated therewith, I have been enabled to lift the veil. We have thus, for the first time, external evidence that shows Charlotte Brontë, at Brussels, endured the greatest ordeal through which it is the lot of a woman to pass. We see how she and M. Héger emerged triumphantly from dangerous temptation, and how they were aided, the one by her Christian upbringing, the other by the influence of his Church.
It was in January 1844 when Charlotte Brontë returned finally from Brussels; and she and her sisters printed a circular in connection with a project of starting a private school at Haworth, but no progress was made. Charlotte Brontë's life at this period will be better understood by a reference to the chapters on "The Recoil" in this work—it was her darkest time: when the human in her cried out—as it has, alas! in so many at the bitter hour. She rebelled. Not violently; but by reproach. Only her own pen can tell how cruelly she suffered mentally. She had done no wrong and had resisted a great evil, but the recoil found her weak: it was the martyrdom of virtue. She was suffering for the sake of right; and that she cried aloud as in an agony showed her suffering was intense. The storm left the world Wuthering Heights. The tone of ribald caricature in dealing with the Pharisee Joseph; the impatient, vindictive pilloring of her own nervous and physical infirmities as "Catherine"; the ruthless baring of the flesh to show "Heathcliffe's" heart was stone; the wilful plunging into an atmosphere of harsh levity, crude animalism, and repulsive hypochondria, all contributed to a sombre and powerful work of art grand in its perpetration, standing alone in solemn majesty like the black rack that stretches low athwart a clear sky—the rearward of the storm. But it bears the story of a sad Night, and Charlotte Brontë's subsequent works were written in repentance: for in Heathcliffe and Catherine of Wuthering Heights she had portrayed M. Héger and herself.
In this dark hour of Charlotte Brontë's life, Emily Brontë, to whom she afterwards gave Wuthering Heights, was writing, on July 30th, 1845,[8] that she, Emily, was "contented and undesponding," and was engaged upon and intended to continue some puerile compositions called The Gondal Chronicles, which she spoke of as "delighting" her and Anne. She and Anne had been engaged upon this effort three and a half years, and it was yet unfinished.
While making comparison between Emily's and Charlotte's standpoint at this time—and Charlotte obtained for herself the names of Currer Bell from Montagu's book which, as I show, contained the "plot," etc., of Wuthering Heights, for her own use in the Brontë poem publishing project of 1845-46—it is most important to note that but some months after Emily's diary entry Wuthering Heights was offered by Charlotte to Messrs. Aylott and Jones, with The Professor and Agnes Grey—on April 6th, 1846. The literal evidence of The Key to the Brontë Works does not require that we ask by what miracle the "contented" Emily Brontë, who had collaborated three and a half years with Anne on The Gondal Chronicles, and declared an intention at the end of July 1845 to "stick firmly" to their composition, could come, in addition to preparing her poems for the press, to begin and to finish Wuthering Heights by or before April 6th, 1846.[9]
After Charlotte Brontë's return from Brussels the degeneracy of her only brother, Patrick Branwell Brontë, a young man ambitious, but not successful, as an artist, made him an object of her disgust and antipathy, and we find she portrayed him unflinchingly as Hindley Earnshaw of Wuthering Heights, and again as John Reed of Jane Eyre. Emily, we have been told, liked her brother, though an attempt was made somewhat recently to dissipate the tradition.[10] But Charlotte, after the deaths of her elder sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, the eldest of the family, obviously was piqued from childhood by the advantage Branwell's sex gave him over her seniority, more especially as he seems to have been brutal to her:—See "A Rainy Day in Charlotte Brontë's Childhood," in The Key to the Brontë Works.
It may be observed Charlotte Brontë went to three schools, and that each had a remarkable influence upon her life and literature. The first was the Clergy Daughters' School in the Kendal locality, to which her sisters Maria, Elizabeth, and Emily also went upon the death of the ailing Mrs. Brontë at Haworth. The second was Miss Wooler's school already mentioned, and the third the Brussels pensionnat. The fact that Jane Eyre virtually opens with the Clergy Daughters' School incidents—incidents drawn from her child-memory regarding the temporary mismanagement of an establishment which subsequently has proved a most useful foundation—shows she began Jane Eyre with the utmost possible fidelity to truth in so far as regarded herself and her associations. The story of how this famous work was sent in 1847 to a firm of publishers who had just declined her novel The Professor is well known history, as is the relation of the subsequent success of the book and the elevation of Charlotte Brontë to the highest recognition.
Wuthering Heights had been published as Ellis Bell's work, a nom de guerre that also had appeared over Emily Brontë's poems. It was issued under the condition that the next book by its author went to the same publisher, a Mr. Newby, which, of course, made impossible thereafter Charlotte Brontë's acknowledging her authorship of this work, as the next book by the author of Wuthering Heights, her Jane Eyre, was published by another house. But there are evidences in Shirley that despite her nervous apprehensions, and her letters show she was very much afraid of this Mr. Newby, who afterwards asserted she wrote Wuthering Heights, she therein carefully placed significations of her authorship of Wuthering Heights.
Villette was published in January 1853, and in the June of 1854 Currer Bell married her father's curate, the Rev. A. B. Nicholls, whom she previously had refused. She married him, it may be, as a final immolation of herself on the altar of Right and Duty. Her married life was but for some few months—it was so short we yet call her Charlotte Brontë. Her father outlived her by six years. The last survivor of the young Brontës, she died in March 1855, within a month of old Tabitha Aykroyd, her best loved woman friend and companion apart from her own kinsfolk. Charlotte Brontë, with other members of her family, rests in the grey fabric which is the modern representative of that early described as the church of St. Michael the Archangel de Haworth. Her message is yet with us; the tablets of her life she has bequeathed to posterity, and the key to open the way to their repository is now in our hands. Her genius has shown the price of right-doing and the grim and dangerous valley through which Virtue must go ere break of Day.