Back after a long absence, in between other writing and musical activities.
Back after a long absence, in between other writing and musical activities.
Member since:13.07.2000
Reviews:262
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It is hardly surprising that the lives of the Brontë sisters (and brother) have attracted so many biographers, and the story of their short existences and premature deaths has been told many a time. Where this new account by Lyndall Gordon differs from what has already been published is in exploring Charlotte's life from a more feminist viewpoint than that of the apparently downtrodden novelist, who in the words of her contemporary and first biographer Mrs Gaskell was ‘a valiant woman made perfect by sufferings.’
Naturally the life takes up a good proportion of the book. Gordon paints the familiar, unhappy picture well – the family growing up in unhealthy Haworth on the Yorkshire moors, where there was polluted water and no sewers, and where the average life expectancy was around 25. She leads the reader through the early deaths of Mrs Brontë and of the two eldest girls, Maria and Elizabeth, the tubercular condition of the two latter exacerbated by the appalling conditions they had to put up with at the school from which their youngest sisters were speedily removed before they had a chance to go the same way. We meet the elderly reserved father, the Reverend Patrick Brontë, and aunt who presided distantly over the girls and their brother. Yet the quiet but strong character of Charlotte, the child who was prone to say very little about herself and averse from making any display of what she knew, the one who shaped herself as a survivor against what she saw as her eldest sisters' 'unresisting' deaths, is emphasised from the start.
The time-honoured image of Charlotte is an enduring one. In the past we have been told that she was the gentle but determined one who helped to nurture the talents of her two younger sisters as well as herself and guide their novels into print, the one who was left behind with an ageing father when first the brother and then both sisters sickened and died within eight months, and the one who finally found married happiness, only to die herself within a year.
Now Gordon gives us a rather different picture, of an outwardly meek but in actual fact very determined, steely woman who refused to be ground down by fate, the one who admitted that ‘it would take a great deal to crush me’. An unrequited passion for her mentor, Professor Heger, during her unhappy time in Brussels, and her anger at the fate of brother Branwell. Himself a talented writer and artist with potential which went to waste after an unhappy love affair and his subsequent drinking himself to death, seem to have spurred her on to make the most of herself.
Criticism of disgracing her sex by being coarse, immoral and undignified, in an age when women were meant to be self-effacing, did nothing to deflect her from writing, and she took much inspiration from her feminist friend from younger days, the ever forthright Mary Taylor.
An interesting affair of sorts with her publisher George Smith also played an important role, before she finally braved her father's disapproval to marry his curate Arthur Bell Nicholls. Though the author suggests that perhaps Charlotte was not cut out for married life, there is little doubt that both partners were happy together. Sadly their life as husband and wife turned out to be cruelly brief, as she died of fever in the later stages of pregnancy.
Overall I felt the book dwelt a little too much in the later chapters on the analysis of Charlotte's personality, and some the author’s theorising could perhaps have been cut back on to make a leaner, tighter book. Nonetheless it is a thoroughly well-researched and reasoned life and study that adds something, even when set alongside the many other biographies of her that have appeared over the years.
(This is a modified version of the review I originally posted on Bookbag)
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