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The Radical Emily Bronte
From: The British Library
| By:
Robert Barnard |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
The Brontë sisters are a fascinating enigma to lovers of 19th-century literature. Raised in West Yorkshire by a widowed father, they received at best a sporadic education, and shunned outside careers. So how did these three sisters--Charlotte, Emily and Anne--manage to produce Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and Agnes Grey, enduring favorites of the English canon?
As a former president of the Brontë Society and author of a new biography of Emily Brontë, Robert Barnard believes that the real characters of the sisters, as well as the depth of their talent, has been misunderstood. Dispelling the myth of the retiring, reclusive Emily, Barnard reveals a more complex character whose juvenilia and journal entries point to a radical, even violent imagination. |
Fathom: Do you think Emily Brontë is a figure who is misunderstood? |
Robert Barnard: I think I have created a consistent portrait, without idealisation. I do not think she was a very pleasant person.  She was really very forthright, very unconventional, and if she went out to a tea-drinking party and said nothing it's because she despised the people she was with and she knew she was not going to get anything out of it. I think she was ruthless, in the sense that she created the conditions of her own life which suited her best and in particular suited her writing best. If this meant that her sister Anne had to go away slaving as a governess in a position she was very unhappy in for five years, well, so be it; Emily had got what she needed. Her own two elder sisters had died. She wanted to peak early and leave something of first-rate importance behind her, and she was ruthless in getting it. |
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| Portrait of Emily by her brother Branwell | |
Fathom: What is remarkable about Wuthering Heights? |
Barnard: The remarkable thing about Wuthering Heights is the dreadful actions it contains. Charlotte herself said they were the sort of things that kept you awake at night. My mother-in-law used to say, every woman should have a Heathcliffe in her life. Well, Heathcliffe lets his own son die because he's too mean to call a doctor. He is a great woman-beater, he's a great woman-tormentor. And yet you don't make moral judgements on him, you identify with him, and my mother-in-law wishes she could have a Heathcliffe in her life. |
Fathom: Is that 'dreadful action' one of the things that makes her unusual as a Victorian writer? |
Barnard: Certainly. You might say there are some elements of affinity with Hardy, but in general Victorian writers like George Eliot are very sophisticated moralists. Emily, I would say, is unmoral. She is saying, what would life be like if we simply were like animals, following our nature as God's put it into us. I think it's a sort of experiment, so that if we had her second novel it might be quite quite different. I don't think it would ever be moral in the way that George Eliot is, but it might be very very different in its feeling to Wuthering Heights. |
Fathom: Can you talk a bit about her extraordinarily accelerated career? |
Barnard: In 1845 the sisters decided to put together a volume of poetry which was disastrously unsuccessful at their own expense. Eventually rather shamefully for Charlotte, Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey were accepted by this scamp of a publisher called Newby who always swindled people. The stories of the minor Victorian authors whom Newby swindled are legion. Charlotte went on sending The Professor round, and nobody wanted it until, luckily for her, she got this wonderful letter from George Smith saying that they didn't feel they could publish it but they did think it showed such promise that they were anxious to see another novel from the same pen. |
By then Charlotte had almost finished Jane Eyre and she'd decided for herself that she had suppressed the romantic side of her nature far too much in The Professor. The publishers sent it to one or two people whom they thought would like it, like Thackeray, and he no doubt went around telling people what a wonderful novel it was. So Newby, who'd been sitting on the manuscript of Jane Eyre, of Agnes Grey and Wuthering Heights for six months or more, suddenly brought them out. |
Well inevitably Wuthering Heights got shocked reviews. You couldn't have a central character, almost a hero, like Heathcliffe doing the terrible things that he does without getting really shocked reviews, but nevertheless, I think you have to emphasise that there were quite a lot of those reviewers that knew they were in the presence of someone quite exceptional, perhaps even more exceptional than the author of Jane Eyre. |
By the end of 1847, the sisters were famous. Acton Bell was their collective pseudonym, as if they were one person. But then something mysterious happened. One of the things about Emily Brontë was that she collected what she wrote, dated what she wrote, and kept it all. Yet from the summer of 1846 when she started sending Wuthering Heights round the publishers, to her death in December of 1848, we have only one attempt at a poem and one attempt at revising that poem. Now that is so unlike the whole career from 1836 onwards, you just cannot believe that she would not try to write another novel. I think it was virtually complete. |
I would guess that what happened was that she never got it to her satisfaction and when she fell ill, she didn't want to leave anything behind of it, because she only wanted to be judged by things that she herself was happy with. Artists are always asking their executors to destroy things. Emily was always an extreme character, and I would think she did it herself or Charlotte did it. |
Fathom: Is there anything to indicate what the second novel was about? |
Barnard: It was not going to be a typical Victorian product. Whereas Charlotte, after Jane Eyre, writes Shirley, which is a very typical sort of Victorian novel and really very lacking in interest compared with Jane Eyre or compared with Villette, which comes afterwards. |
Fathom: How do you characterise the typical Victorian novel? |
Barnard: Well, I'm not thinking of your Dickens and your George Eliots really, I'm thinking of your average Victorian novel. People like Mrs Trollope, Mrs Gore-- the middle of the road. I would say what is typical about Shirley, is that the passion is very decorous. When Caroline feels that her love is not returned by Robert Moore she sort of wilts. |
Fathom: There's a very interesting bit of a translation that Emily was doing for school with her own violent illustrations around it. |
Barnard: The flagellation scenes, yes. She was doing the translation for her father. She was translating Horace's The Art of Poetry, and Virgil's Aeneid, but then in the margins you have these strange pictures of what looks like school boys being beaten. Once you start thinking about the Brontë's work, you realize there are an extraordinary number of sadistic scenes. I find the scene where Heathcliffe buffets the younger Catherine's head extremely unpleasant and extreme, but worse than that is a scene in Charlotte Brontë's unfinished novel called Ashworth where you've got a big burly elder brother literally whipping his younger brother. |
Fathom: Can you tell us about Emily's childhood and education? |
Barnard: It was a very sporadic education. When her sister Charlotte went away to school, the intention was that when she came home she would be equipped to educate the younger children, otherwise they'd been taught the elements by Aunt Branwall, who was looking after them after their mother died. |
The odd thing about her education is that Emily Brontë seemed to develop two writing styles. One was virtually illiterate, which has led one or two funny people to say she couldn't possibly have written Wuthering Heights because she couldn't spell elementary words like 'much', or even her sister's name. |
Fathom: Who were some of her preferred authors? |
Barnard: We don't quite know how much she read, but you hear verbal echoes of Elizabethan and Jacobean writers, even of the Restoration Tragedy writers. You certainly hear echoes of Shakespeare. To my mind Wuthering Heights is among one of the three great English novels. She is aiming not only to be with Shakespeare, but with some of the darker Jacobean dramatists like Webster, and that is pretty remarkable in somebody whose education has been very spasmodic. |
Fathom: When was Emily sent away to school? |
Barnard: Emily was sent away briefly to the dreadful Cowanbridge School, which Charlotte Brontë depicts as Lowood in Jane Eyre. Then they all came home and learnt from their aunt. They started an imaginary kingdom called Angria, which eventually was dominated by Charlotte and Branwell, the two eldest, so Emily and Anne set up their own kingdom of Gondal. |
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| The dining room of the Parsonage at Haworth | |
Gondal, though it has a lot of melodramatic and childish elements, could also give rise to poems of great intensity and personality. It was a disguise, it was a mask, but it was a very flexible one, so that Emily could use it for things like home-sickness and her own mystical experiences, whatever they were on the moor. I would think that Wuthering Heights must have been germinating in her mind for a long, long time. |
Fathom: The two elder sisters who died--Elizabeth and Maria-- would they have been writers? |
Barnard: Maria would have been. Maria was, according to Patrick, the most exceptional of the children. It's a pity in a sense that what we know of Maria comes from Helen Burns in Jane Eyre who is a bit of a stick really. Their brother Branwell's problem really was that all the time through his childhood he was treated as the most exceptional of the children, which I think at that age he was, frankly. If you read his juvenilia or his early writings written when he was about fifteen and then compare them with Charlotte's early writings when she she was about fifteen, it's Branwell that you would have bet on. Branwell reached his top first and then he had the added shame--remember what a very male-dominated society Victorian was--of realising that the exceptional ones in the family were the girls, not the boy. |
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