Brontë and her biography

I finished Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Bronte a week ago, and though I really enjoyed it, it made me realize why I like fiction so much. It isn’t that fiction is more interesting (though it can be), it is that it isn’t real. When I grow attached to Mr. Bush or Osborne Hamley, and cry over their death, I always know that it isn’t real, so the pain isn’t real either. But growing attached to Charlotte Brontë through the four hundred page book made the end of her life really tragic.

She was a quiet but deep feeling woman who grew up in the lonely moors of Yorkshire. Her two older sisters and her mother died when she was a child, leaving her the oldest among the remaining four children. Emily was wild and willful, Anne was shy and sensitive, and Branwell was capricious, so it remained to practical yet idealistic Charlotte to keep the house together.

All four siblings were incredibly precocious, but of all of them, Charlotte was the most simple, the most easy to love, despite her reputation for wild and passionate stories (this really belongs to Emily). They told stories to each other about two fantasy worlds they had created, and this creative gift followed them into their young adult life. At first they wrote poetry too, some of which Charlotte sent to the poet Southey to ask his opinion. His response struck me as very kind and thoughtful:

“It is not my advice that you have asked as to the direction of your talents, but my opinion of them, and yet the opinion may be worth little, and the advice much. You evidently possess, and in no inconsiderable degree, what Wordsworth calls the ‘faculty of verse.’ I am not depreciating it when I say that in these times it is not rare. Many volumes of poems are now published every year without attracting public attention, any one of which if it had appeared half a century ago, would have obtained a high reputation for its author. Whoever, therefore, is ambitious of distinction in this way ought to be prepared for disappointment.

“But it is not with a view to distinction that you should cultivate this talent, if you consult your own happiness. I, who have made literature my profession, and devoted my life to it, and have never for a moment repented of the deliberate choice, think myself, nevertheless, bound in duty to caution every young man who applies as an aspirant to me for encouragement and advice, against taking so perilous a course. You will say that a woman has no need of such a caution; there can be no peril in it for her. In a certain sense this is true; but there is a danger of which I would, with all kindness and all earnestness, warn you. The daydreams in which you habitually indulge are likely to induce a distempered state of mind; and in proportion as all the ordinary uses of the world seem to you flat and unprofitable, you will be unfitted for them without becoming fitted for anything else. Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life, and it ought not to be. The more she is engaged in her proper duties, the less leisure will she have for it, even as an accomplishment and a recreation. To those duties you have not yet been called, and when you are you will be less eager for celebrity. You will not seek in imagination for excitement, of which the vicissitudes of this life, and the anxieties from which you must not hope to be exempted, be your state what it may, will bring with them but too much.

“But do not suppose that I disparage the gift which you possess; nor that I would discourage you from exercising it. I only exhort you so to think of it, and so to use it, as to render it conducive to your own permanent good. Write poetry for its own sake; not in a spirit of emulation, and not with a view to celebrity; the less you aim at that the more likely you will be to deserve and finally to obtain it. So written, it is wholesome both for the heart and soul; it may be made the surest means, next to religion, of soothing the mind and elevating it. You may embody in it your best thoughts and your wisest feelings, and in so doing discipline and strengthen them.

“Farewell, madam. It is not because I have forgotten that I was once young myself, that I write to you in this strain; but because I remember it. You will neither doubt my sincerity nor my good will; and however ill what has here been said may accord with your present views and temper, the longer you live the more reasonable it will appear to you. Though I may be but an ungracious adviser, you will allow me, therefore, to subscribe myself, with the best wishes for your happiness here and hereafter, your true friend,

“ROBERT SOUTHEY.”

She did continue writing, and eventually made her living out of it, giving to the world such wonderful stories as Jane Eyre, Villette, and Shirley. Emily, always a strange and wild child, gave the equally strange and wild Wuthering Heights; and quiet Anne gave the surprisingly strong Agnes Gray and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.

Despite the fame she got from her writings, Charlotte’s family tragedies threatened to overcome her spirit. Emily, Anne, and Branwell followed their sisters and mother to the grave when they were still very young, leaving Charlotte and her father alone in the country parsonage of Haworth. But Charlotte, though she felt deeply, had the strength of character to carry her through. She continued writing after that, and maintained a few close friendships that she had made. Many years passed. Her father’s curate eventually proposed to her after suffering under a concealed passion for years. He was a good man and she was fond of him, and he had a good position in life, so she married him. It was a good choice, for for about a year they were particularly happy, as she learned to love him greatly. Finally, she had gained the happy marriage that she promised to her heroines. Then just as she was expecting a child, she died.

How awfully tragic! If this had been a fictional story, I could have had a good cry and moved on. But the fact that it was real made it worse. Charlotte Brontë was a real woman, who had many real trials, and the story of her life is not happy. And thus it is that I have felt about histories and biographies: why would I want to read about unhappy real people? If I’m going to feel grief about something, wouldn’t I rather the sadness be only in my imagination?

But while I still prefer fiction, recently biographies have started to hold an attraction for me because they are real. While I may sigh for the fact that Paul Emmanuel exists only in my head, there are some truly wonderful and interesting people that were real, and who people actually knew, and who benefitted the real world. And that at least is worth the reading about the sadness of their lives.