Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, May 28, 1995 TAG: 9505300136
SECTION: BOOK PAGE: G-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: REVIEWED BY NICHOLAS A. BASBANES
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
When Charlotte Bronte died in 1855 a few weeks short of her 39th birthday, a prevailing perception was that the author of "Jane Eyre," "Villette," and "Shirley" had lived a life of fruitless love and unbearable misfortune.
Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell, a friend of the Bronte family and Charlotte's first biographer, set her 1857 study of the Yorkshire writer against a backdrop of deathbeds and gravestones, mute testimony to the wrenching funerals the woman attended between 1825 and 1849 for Maria, Elizabeth, Anne and Emily Bronte, her sisters, and Branwell Bronte, a talented artist and her only brother.
Despite their brief lives, the three eldest daughters of the Rev. Patrick Bronte produced seven novels in their austere home on the moors of northern England, all under the pen names of men. Anne published "Agnes Grey" and 'The Tenant of Wildfell Hall' as Acton Bell; Emily wrote "Wuthering Heights' as Ellis Bell, and Charlotte used Currer Bell as her pseudonym. The role of women being what it was in Victorian society, the identity of the sisters as authors was unknown at first, even to their publishers.
When the literary establishment discovered that women had invaded their territory, there was fuming. Matthew Arnold described Charlotte as a woman of "hunger, rebellion and rage." William Makepeace Thackeray, the celebrated author of "Vanity Fair," admired her mind, but found her too aggressive. "There's a fire and fury raging in that little woman, a rage scorching her heart which doesn't suit me," he told friends.
Because she was the most professional of her sisters, and because she lived the longest, Charlotte has always attracted the most attention, though Emily's "Wuthering Heights" is an undisputed masterpiece. A factor ignored by most biographers over the years, however, is the degree to which Charlotte's largely unexamined personal life became the basis of so much of her fiction, and how emotionally charged it was.
This exceptional new biography by Lyndall Gordon, takes particular note of the relationship between the woman's actual experience and her artistic expression. Indeed, rarely do the personal lives of novelists parallel the experiences of the characters that emerge from their imaginations as profoundly as that of Charlotte Bronte.
Because it is a literary biography, Gordon, a fellow in English at St. Hilda's College, Oxford University, draws richly on Bronte's fiction, offering intelligent readings of the work in context with the poignant events and relationships of the writer's life. She makes generous use as well of the many revealing letters she wrote over the years to friends and acquaintances.
"I think it's terribly interesting to get close to what Henry James called the 'private life,' which is almost a life apart and something quite distinct from the public appearances," Gordon explained in a recent interview. "I do think that when you write about writers, it is imperative to first see that the work was the center of their lives."
Gordon shows how Charlotte's intense friendship in Brussels during the early 1840s with Constantin Heger, her married French teacher, provided the basis for Paul Emanuel in "Villette." She compares Charlotte's own poignant departure from Brussels with Jane Eyre's fictional flight from Thornfield. Charlotte's later relationship with her publisher, George Murray Smith, a man eight years her junior, provides additional insight into her writing.
"I do not accept the traditional view that Charlotte lived a life of desolation and suffering," Gordon said. "It is true that her public appearances were very messy, and that the passion and vehemence in her writing seemed coarse to others. It was the middle of the 19th century, she was supposed to conform, and she had to appear very modest and very quiet. But if you listen to the voice in her writing, she is the antithesis of this. She's volcanic, fiery, passionate - and very professional."
Instead of letting tragedy and unhappiness defeat her, Bronte immersed herself in productive work. "She had the strength to turn loss into gain," Gordon said. After the death of Anne, her last surviving sibling, in 1849, Charlotte wrote to a friend how "one by one" she had "closed their glazed eyes," yet "God has upheld me."
Not only was she "upheld" by her faith, but infused with a burst of creative energy. "The fact is my work is my best companion," she wrote a friend. "Hereafter I look for no great earthly comfort except what congenial occupation can give." Nine months before she died of a digestive tract infection, Charlotte married Arthur Bell Nicholls, her father's curate, a union that seemed to suit her so much that she abandoned her last novel, "Emma." A measure of happiness, though short-lived, apparently was hers to the end.
Gordon said her task as a biographer is to "fill in the gaps" of her subject's life. "What I must do is bring forward the invisible Charlotte Bronte, the writer, and I do it by putting her work at the center of her life." Her earlier books include critical biographies of T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf, writers who, like Bronte, drew on their own experiences as inspiration for their writing.
"I'm interested in the interconnections between the life and the work, and I don't think it's illegitimate to read back from the work to the life," she said. "If you understand that art is a product of a time, a place, a particular individual, and that the personal concerns that go into a work coexist with what is impersonal and timeless, it only deepens your understanding of the work of art."
Nicholas A. Basbanes is a Massachusetts journalist who writes frequently about books and authors.
by CNB