The Secret History of Jane Eyre Read online

  His ensuing nightmares begin with a skeleton in a white sheet which leads him, paralyzed into silence by fear, to scenes such as an enormous waterfall in “clouds of spray” rolling down “tremendous precipices” and then into mines deep under the ocean where, despite the magnificence of the subterranean corridors, he feels fear and terror because the sea is raging overhead, threatening to overwhelm everything. The sequence ends with a desert cave in which a “royal lion” wakes, fixes him with its terrible eyes, and delivers a “tremendous roar of fierce delight.” Just as with Charlotte’s later narratives of her dream reveries at Roe Head, here too the laconic Irish boy suddenly wakes the sleeper where the morning sun now illuminates “the little old-fashioned room at the top of O’Callaghan Castle.”

  There is a lot of fun here, the thrills and chills of the gothic tradition, along with tales of exploration in distant lands. But almost certainly running beneath the surface is a string of dream-visions of the dangers in Catholic emancipation. We are in Ireland, Patrick Brontë’s birth place, and we find it is haunted by a seemingly dead past that returns as a spectral presence. Charlotte uses the terrifying ocean, which seems to be about to overwhelm the glittering arches of the palatial mines, as an allegory for the threats of national rebellion, only to be replaced by what must be the British monarchical lion fiercely delighting in the assertion of his primacy.

  The Jane Eyre who will tell the stories of the red-room, of the mysteriously locked third-floor room at Thornfield, who will describe premonitory thunderstorms that snap trees in half and the terrifying desolation of a solitary wanderer in the moors is taking shape as Charlotte Brontë begins to find elements of her distinctive voice.

  Jane remains at Lowood. From her first days there she had hoped to make friends, to “earn respect, and win affection.” After Helen’s death, Jane pursues her studies with “a desire to excel in all,” seeking to please her teachers as she availed herself of “the advantages offered me.” With time, she rises to become “the first girl of the first class.”

  After Charlotte’s six happy years at home, Patrick Brontë decided to enroll her in the Roe Head school. For Charlotte this second displacement from home and family was difficult and challenging—not as abrupt and overwhelming as being sent as an eight-year-old to Cowan Bridge, but nevertheless not very easy. There she was to face some of the challenges she later presents to her fictional self, Jane Eyre, but also difficulties that Jane never had to confront.

  On the day of Charlotte’s arrival, January 17, 1831, bitterly ­homesick already, she was discovered by another, similarly unhappy new girl, who later remembered her in their first encounter as “a silent, weeping, dark little figure in the large bay-window.” She seemed, to Ellen Nussey, “anything but pretty.” Her hair was “dry and frizzy-looking, screwed up in tight little curls, showing features that were all the plainer from her exceeding thinness and want of complexion.” Mary Taylor, who met her too on this first day, recalled Charlotte’s arrival with equal vividness. “I first saw her coming out of a covered cart, in very old-fashioned clothes and looking very cold and miserable.” In the classroom she looked like a “little, old woman, so short-sighted that she always appeared to be seeking something, and moving her head from side to side to catch a sight of it. She was very shy and nervous and spoke with a strong Irish accent.”

  School for the adolescent Charlotte was, just as it was later to be for the fictive Jane Eyre, an opportunity—a means to prove and transform herself. At the same time it was a burden. Charlotte was, as Ellen Nussey put it, “an object of expense to those at home” and so had to use every moment of study to “fit herself for governess life.” This anxiety bore down hard on the fifteen year old. She couldn’t play or amuse herself like the other girls. In the evenings when they gathered around the fire she would kneel close to the window busy with her studies, and this would last so long that the other girls teased her about “seeing in the dark.” The scene in Jane Eyre’s first paragraphs with Jane seated at the window on a cold, rainy afternoon is thus partly a recollection of Charlotte’s early months as an unproven student, to some degree marginalized by the oddity of her appearance, her short-sightedness, her almost foreign accent.

  Jane Eyre and Charlotte both felt the difficulty of being different. Through success in their studies, both were to earn respect and friendship from their fellow students and their teachers. Mary ­Taylor was struck by Charlotte’s wide-ranging knowledge. She was already familiar with the passages of poetry students had to memorize and could explain to the others who the authors were, the texts they came from, and would “sometimes repeat a page or two, and tell us the plot.” Mary gratefully recalled, “She made poetry and drawing . . . exceedingly interesting to me.”

  Within months Charlotte was recognized as a top student in the school. Like Jane she became “first girl.” Both succeeded through diligent hard work and self-control—though to a more critical eye their rewards are meager: a few school awards and trophies, things that soon melt into insignificance when confronted with life’s real-world challenges. From the start Ellen sees Charlotte as being trained for an unrewarding job: being a governess, the same role Jane Eyre was later to take up.

  That Charlotte was already a prolific writer of poetry and prose narratives remained a closely guarded secret from even her closest school friends, but her parallel dedication to drawing was well known to them. It was one of the skills Roe Head students were taught. She did detailed depictions of flowers and plants, copies of portraits of people’s faces, and some very successful landscapes, even a charming depiction of the school building. In this way friends recognized early on that Brontë aspired not to be a governess, but rather an artist. When she was unhappy with a picture, she would destroy it, then “cheerfully set to work again intent on achieving her ideal if possible.” Had Brontë permitted Ellen to see her secret writings, her close friend would have understood even more fully ­Charlotte’s artistic ambition.

  Jane Eyre, too, from her youthful days at Lowood school was an eager and intent visual artist. She tells us how her skill at drawing equals her success in the classroom and lists “the spectacle of ideal drawings” that she plans to execute, “freely penciled houses and trees, picturesque rocks and ruins, . . . sweet paintings of butterflies hovering over unblown roses, of birds picking at ripe cherries, of wrens’ nests enclosing pearl-like eggs, wreathed about with young ivy sprays.” Pictures very like Charlotte’s Roe Head drawings in subject and planned execution. And perhaps listed here ironically since these subjects are of a particularly cloying character, the sort required of proper women students and without a trace of innovation or challenge. In Chapter Seven we will take a close look at Jane Eyre’s later drawings, which Brontë describes in detail—pictures completely different from these stereotyped early works, radically new in conception and execution.

  When Jane leaves Lowood she leaves behind whatever friends she may have made. She presents herself to the reader as almost completely alone. The only person who remembers and takes any interest at all in her is Bessie, the servant from Gateshead. Things were very different for Charlotte Brontë. Back at Haworth, she returned to the excitement of writing shared with Branwell, as they continued their chronicles of the fantasy world Angria, and expanded the range of her own world and experience. Shortly after leaving Miss Wooler’s school in June of 1832, the sixteen-year-old Charlotte visited the homes of her two best school friends. The Nusseys lived in Rydings, at Birstall, an old house with a castellated roof line and extensive gardens. When Branwell accompanied Charlotte on her second visit, as Ellen later recalled, “he was in wild ecstasy” with everything. He loved the turret-roofed house, the fine chestnut trees on the lawn (one of which was iron “girthed,” having been split by storms but still flourishing in great majesty), and a large rookery that gave a good background to the house. He told Charlotte “he was leaving her in Paradise.” The split chestnut tree was to make a dramatic reappearance in Chapter XXIII of
Jane Eyre.

  Ellen’s was an extensive and lively family, and Charlotte, accustomed to the intimacy and familiarity of Haworth, was painfully shy among them. Still, she got to know them all, and in the years to come she would discuss each of them and their lives in her letters to Ellen—Henry, for instance, who became a clergyman (we shall hear more of him later), and George, whose encroaching mental illness led to his becoming permanently kept in an asylum. He certainly was on Charlotte’s mind as she began to imagine the fate of Bertha Mason Rochester. At the time, the Nusseys were still financially prosperous, and Ellen’s future promised to be far more attractive than Brontë’s.

  She later visited her friend Mary Taylor at her home, the Red House, a large, Georgian brick building in Gomersal surrounded by lawns and a grove of walnut trees. There Charlotte, a lifelong conservative, ardent admirer of the Duke of Wellington and his opposition to the Reform Act of 1832, entered into lively discussions with the Taylors, convinced political radicals, about the burning issues of the day. A third visit took her to the home of her father’s friends, the Atkinsons, whose vicarage was called Green House. Her anxiety among strangers returning, she retreated to the garden whenever she could. Charlotte’s intermittent shyness during these visits anticipated Jane Eyre’s marginal position at Rochester’s house parties.

  Four years later, in June of 1836, she visited another Roe Head alumna, Amelia Walker, whose family home Lascelles Hall, at least part of which was from the sixteenth century, included large, “‘park-like’ grounds.” In a subsequent letter Charlotte attacked Amelia as “monstrously gracious” during her visit, “changing her character every half hour.” Amelia had become exemplary of how money and status lead to insincere role playing and mindless vanity, pretending at one moment to be “the sweet sentimentalist,” then a moment later “the reckless rattler.” Sometimes the question was ‘Shall I look prettiest lofty?’ and again ‘Would not tender familiarity suit me better?’ At one moment she affected to inquire after her old school-acquaintance the next she was detailing anecdotes of High Life.” Charlotte found her brother an “incorrigible Booby.”

  In these years Charlotte Brontë had firsthand experience of the adult world she would depict in Jane Eyre. She saw, visited, and explored a mélange of country houses whose architecture and interior decorations provided hints for her future invention, Thornfield, as well as the gardens, out buildings, and landscapes where Jane Eyre is to meet Mr. Rochester for their ever-more intimate and revelatory conversations. Charlotte Brontë was strolling the grounds, seeing the arriving guests, being the uncomfortable visitor, and formed her judgments accordingly. Echoing Jane Eyre’s satirical description of the house party at Thornfield, Charlotte, writing to Ellen Nussey in January 1847, summarizes her experiences: “As to society I don’t understand much about it – . . . it seems to me a very strange, complicated affair indeed – wherein Nature is turned upside down – . . . eternal and tedious botheration is their notion of happiness – sensible pursuits their ennui.”

  The tart frankness of these letters is absolutely typical of the written voice both of Brontë and of her narrator Jane Eyre. It’s how she presented herself to her two best friends in their frequent and lively correspondence. Let us look for a moment at a couple of examples taken from letters of 1834, two years after Charlotte has left Roe Head.

  In a letter of February 20, 1834, Charlotte writes to Ellen that she has recently received a letter from Mary telling of Ellen’s departure for an extended visit to London. Charlotte teases Ellen for what appears to her to be an excessively calm reaction to a city that “has drawn exclamations of astonishment” from world travelers in order not to appear “country bred,” and she wonders if Ellen has seen any of the “Great Personages” then in London for the sitting of Parliament—including Charlotte’s hero the Duke of Wellington. Living a relatively isolated life in Haworth, and eagerly curious to visit the metropolis she has read so much about, Brontë suggests how differently she would approach such an opportunity.

  And yet in her next surviving letter from June 19, she celebrates the fact that Ellen returns home as natural and unsophisticated as when she first left. She assesses what this implies: “I see no affectation in your letters, no trifling no frivolous contempt of plain, and weak admiration of showy persons and things.” Note the intimacy, and the confident certitude in judgment of Brontë’s voice here, so much like Jane Eyre’s. Charlotte claims a skill in exploring the “turning, windings inconsistencies and obscurities” of human nature. Unbeknownst to her friend, Charlotte’s by now voluminous fiction writing suggests that her boast has substance. The future author of Jane Eyre and Villette is staking her claim to special insights into the human heart.

  In a third letter, from July 4, Brontë writes regretfully of the news that the Nussey family may have to sell their home. “Rydings,” she observes, unconsciously anticipating her own imagined Thornfield that is to come, “is a pleasant spot, one of the old family Halls of England, surrounded by Lawn and wood-land, speaking of past times and suggesting (to me at least) happy feelings.” Jane Eyre will share a similar rueful retrospective when she finds herself torn from Thornfield and Mr. Rochester by her own willed decision.

  1825 to 1835 were thus happy years of growth and personal development for Brontë, a period in which her schoolmates and friends came to know her as remarkably knowledgeable, witty, frankly affectionate, and self-confident. A woman becoming, indeed, in some respects more and more like the Jane Eyre who sums up briefly her similar development at the fictional Lowood. For both, however, this period of gestation had to end. At age eighteen Jane finds herself yearning for “liberty” and prepared to accept a new form of “servitude” by taking the job of governess. Similarly, the economic needs of her family lead Charlotte, age nineteen, to take her first paying job. This event opens up a much more complex and frequently very unhappy phase in her life. Crucial to Charlotte will be the continuing love and support of her family, particularly her sisters Emily and Anne, as well as the sympathetic and supportive respect and affection of her old school friends. Jane Eyre will have to take this next step on her own.

  5

  A Situation

  The reproach of her “dependence” had been a “painful and crushing” sing-song in Jane Eyre’s earliest memories. Orphaned at an early age, without any family or any money, though she is technically middle class, she can only hope for a “humble” place and to make herself quietly “agreeable.”

  In seeking a new form of “servitude,” this is what Jane wants: a situation. That is what she is offered by Mrs. Fairfax, who replies to an advertisement Jane has placed in a local newspaper. Jane is assured there is “but one pupil, a little girl under ten years of age . . .” and she imagines this Mrs. Fairfax “in a black gown and widow’s cap,” hopefully “a model of elderly English respectability.” However, the term “situation” can mean quite different things. A job, yes, but also an alternative Jane actually considers: “some scrape!” Both await her at Thornfield Hall.

  Jane’s impulsive wish to dramatically change her life directly mirrors one of Charlotte Brontë’s attempts to break free of the constraints imprisoning her. During the Christmas holidays of 1836, back home from teaching at Roe Head, she wrote to poet laureate Robert Southey about her dreams of being a writer, including two examples of her recent poetry in a letter. Her turn to this literary father figure led to unhappy consequences. Southey replied a little more than two months later in terms cautiously amiable but shattering. “The daydreams in which you habitually indulge,” he wrote, “are likely to induce a distempered state of mind,” and he warned her that pursuing her Angrian fantasies would in time make her incapable of doing anything further as a writer. For Charlotte Brontë, who found this imagined world to be her only escape from what was often a dreary daily life, his was a heart-stopping prohibition. The warning that this daydreaming might lead to a kind of madness—“a distempered . . . mind”—could only feed her anxiety abou
t her current mental state.

  Southey then concluded, in language he could never have imagined would make him more than a century later a perfect example of patriarchal opposition to feminist ambition, “Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life: & 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 & a recreation.” The conflict between the domestic and familial responsibilities Charlotte was expected to fulfill versus the creative ambition and ardent passions that stirred her could not have been stated more absolutely; the phrase “proper duties” severely voicing a sense of cultural and religiously sanctioned certitude.

  In a poem written two months later, Brontë pictured a “restless eye” that looms over her solitude, and an inner life trying to conceal a “secret” which is constantly revealed by her smothered sighs and silent tears. While these lines may form a part of one of the love stories in her Angrian tales, they readily suggest as well her anxiety about Southey’s chilling assertions that seem, as the poem goes on, to now wake her from some kind of “wild dream.” Desperately, she hopes, “Pride should sometimes speak” and “that bondsman break / Its self-locked chain ere yet too late.” Chained talent—notably, a “self-locked” chain suggesting how fully she has accepted and internalized Southey’s certitude—leading to a haunted solitude of unfulfilled dreams, stall the poem’s speaker, who in the last stanzas must turn to prayer and a hope that a divine “Father” will take her to a “haven” beyond this present life where grief can no longer “vex my home!” These theological consolations are a regular feature in the poetry of Charlotte’s sister Emily and in their father’s writing as well. But they were scant comfort for the unhappiness of Charlotte Brontë’s daily life.