The Secret History of Jane Eyre Read online

  Charlotte, age nineteen, had returned to the Roe Head July 29, 1835, as a teacher, and had been working there for a year and a half when she wrote the letter to Southey. She would remain there until December of 1838. For much of this three-and-a-half-year span she was angrily unhappy. Scorning her pupils and prevented by long hours at work from continuing the narratives and poems she shared with her brother Branwell, Charlotte lived a life of nervous fatigue and desperation.

  Jane Eyre presents her two years as a teacher in an idealized summary of personal development and adaptation, in sharp contrast to Charlotte’s own experience. However, immediately beneath the surface of what Jane says one easily recognizes echoes of Charlotte’s unhappy past experience. Jane comments that she “remained an inmate” at Lowood, where her “life was uniform: but not unhappy because it was not inactive.” The term “inmate” captures not only Jane’s but also Charlotte’s sense that teaching and boarding in a rural school for girls was not very different from imprisonment. The uniformity of life suggests disciplinary rigor and sameness that leads to Jane’s double negatives “not unhappy . . . not inactive” which unsuccessfully gloss over her frustration. Both young women seek to “avail” themselves of opportunities that they really don’t seek. Jane’s description of her teaching as “discharged with zeal” is a sugar-coated denial of Charlotte’s detestation of her Roe Head pupils whom she characterized as “fat-headed oafs.” There is no question that when she came to invent John, Eliza, and Georgiana Reed, Charlotte recalled her intense animus toward these children, and that it fueled Jane’s angry, satirical attacks on them. While Jane claims to have achieved control over her earlier rages with “better-regulated feelings,” Charlotte’s writing from these years tells another story, of an emotional life in which “there was always excess.” She was always “too excited or too despondent.”

  This revelatory comment comes from an essay Brontë wrote a few years after leaving Roe Head, and the essay, as a whole, captures the ultimate source of her dissatisfaction with teaching. In it, thinking about herself as a young pupil eager to recite long passages of poetry; diligently spending whole days executing drawings in fine detail, reveling in her years of spirited, collaborative writing, she had become convinced of “the difference which existed between me and most of the people who surrounded me . . . I believe that I have Genius.” These remarks clearly voice her long-standing sense of herself. Struggling against the imposed presupposition from her earliest days that she was to be trained as a governess or teacher, Brontë, feeling deep within herself that she was destined for a very different life, could not help but feel that the demands of her current life were detestably wrong. The letter to Southey further illustrates how she felt. How could she assume, as she desperately writes in her “Roe Head Journal,” “an air of kindness, patience & assiduity” in treating her students when she wonders “am I to spend all of the best part of my life in this wretched bondage, forcibly suppressing my rage at the idleness the apathy and the hyperbolical & most asinine stupidity” of the pupils? The burden was sometimes almost insupportable. One night, lying sleepless in bed, listening to students coming into the room “to get their curl-papers” and whispering about her, she felt as if “heavy weight laid across me . . . as if some huge animal had flung itself across me—a horrid apprehension quickened every pulse I had. I must get up I thought.” But escape proved not so easy to achieve.

  Hardest for Charlotte was the painful sense that she was being forced to abandon the creatures of her imagination because she was overwhelmed by the burden of her daily obligations. There is a whole cluster of poems from this period in which she laments the loss of the characters and fantasy lands she had once escaped to with her siblings. “But once again, but once again / I’ll bid the strings awake . . .” from January of 1836 written during a holiday vacation from Roe Head is typical. She bids farewell, lamenting to her “comrades” that they must part. Of her favorite, Zamorna, she says:

  . . . he has held

  A lofty, burning lamp to me

  Whose rays surrounding darkness quelled

  And shewed me wonder, shadow free . . .

  Indeed to her he had been a “god.” Still he dwells “divine” in his “marble shrine,” but now only a dream of past glory she rarely glimpses. Though she stopped writing fantasies set in Angria, Charlotte was not to lose sight of Zamorna. In Chapters Six and Seven we shall see how he returns to her, present in Mr. Rochester.

  Charlotte gives Jane the same inner power—call it genius—that Charlotte claimed. One illustration of this is Jane’s remarkable ability as a visual artist, and in Chapter Six we will scrutinize several of the pictures she has been creating during these Lowood years. But there is an even more convincing illustration of Jane’s right to this claim in the very book we are reading. It is the “Autobiography” itself which constitutes the most powerful argument imaginable that Jane Eyre can insist that a “difference . . . existed between me and most of the people who surrounded me.” The novel demonstrates her power as a writer on every page. In so doing it justifies Charlotte’s desire to break free of Roe Head, and Jane’s longing to follow the “white road” which she glimpses out of the window at Lowood, in search for the liberty she desires.

  Paradoxically, Miss Wooler’s invitation to Charlotte to return to the school where she had been such a promising student to join its faculty was almost certainly an act of kindness. She knew of the Brontës’ straitened economic circumstances and giving a job to the oldest daughter was her way to help. Claire Harman in her recent biography of Charlotte writes with warm sympathy of Wooler, whose nephew described her as “‘a keen-witted, ironical and very independent Yorkshire woman,’ sensible, even-tempered and sensitive to the needs of her charges”—the type of woman who could readily serve Charlotte as a role model. In the evening Wooler typically chatted with her pupils telling stories, at times walking up and down the length of the Roe Head schoolroom “with the girls hanging about her ‘delighted to listen to her, or have a chance of being nearest in the walk.’” As time passed, however, the supportive companionship of this kind woman could not allay what biographer Juliet Barker describes as Charlotte’s “overwrought state of mind.” The climax came during the Easter season of 1838 when, for sixteen days, Brontë was left on her own to run the school. A sign perhaps of Wooler’s respect for Charlotte. But she was not up to the responsibility: “My health and spirits utterly failed me,” she told Ellen Nussey, and a doctor urged her to return to Haworth “if I valued my life.” She feels herself a “shattered wretch” who has somehow survived “weeks of mental and bodily anguish not to be described.” The kindly apothecary Mr. Lloyd, who visits a similarly shattered Jane Eyre after the red-room experience, may come from this experience. More generally, Jane Eyre’s extreme emotional states and particularly the crisis moments when she must break away from overwhelming inner oppression stem from Brontë’s memories of these days when she had to flee.

  Only eight months later Brontë finds herself in, if anything, worse circumstances. They would, again, provide her with powerful inspiration for her future novel.

  Beginning life as a governess was far more unpleasant for Charlotte Brontë and her sister Anne than it was for Jane Eyre. When only a little more than eighteen years old, Anne served for nine months (April–December 1839) as governess for the Ingham family in charge of their two oldest children. Her novel, Agnes Grey, recounts her disillusionment as she begins to learn what being a governess actually entails.

  It opens with its eponymous heroine ironically recalling her happy anticipations: “How delightful it would be to be a governess! To go out into the world; to enter upon a new life; to act for myself; to exercise my unused faculties; to try my unknown powers.” In considering sources for John Reed, we have already met Agnes’ pupil Tom Bloomfield who introduces himself by showing her his trapped birds that he happily tortures. His sister Mary Ann, a six-year-old child, ignores her teacher, literally lying on the fl
oor much of the time. Their mother persistently sides with the children and limits Agnes’ efforts to discipline them. A half year later, Anne Brontë became governess at Thorp Green Hall where she was happier and remained for several years. After she left she began writing her governess novel Agnes Grey, which Charlotte had read before starting Jane Eyre.

  Years later Charlotte Brontë, discussing Agnes Grey with Elizabeth Gaskell, told her: “none but those who had been in the position of a governess could ever realize the dark side of ‘respectable’ human nature . . . daily giving way to selfishness and ill-temper, till its [i.e., “respectable human nature’s”] conduct towards those dependent on it sometimes amount[s] to a tyranny.” Here she echoes Jane Eyre’s description of John Reed’s “violent tyrannies,” and she remembers as well the ruthless power of his mother Mrs. Reed. Charlotte thought about liberty and justice frequently throughout her adult life. In a letter from 1848, she repeats similar assertions saying that a governess lived “a life of inexpressible misery; tyrannized over, finding her efforts to please and teach utterly vain, chagrined, distressed, worried—so badgered so trodden-on, that she ceased almost at last to know herself . . . her oppressed mind . . . prisoned,” and so became unable to imagine that other people might treat her with respect and affection. Here the whole repertoire of Jane Eyre’s first scenes—­tyranny, shame, imprisonment—reappears in Charlotte’s summary of what it means to be a governess. She remembered her experiences, and those of her sister Anne, as she sat down to write that novel’s first chapters.

  Charlotte’s first “situation” as a temporary governess began in May 1839, at an estate named Stonegappe, a large house of three stories set on a hillside surrounded by woods, enjoying a vista in the distance of the valley of the River Aire. Charlotte was to care for a young girl and her brother—the stone-throwing son of the Sidgwick family we have seen as a model for John Reed. For the socially awkward and impoverished Brontë, at age twenty-three, the inferior position of governess in a wealthy family was an almost intolerable position, far worse than teaching at Roe Head. She was ignored by adult family members, charged with insolent and rebellious children, and denied respect by all, though she considered herself not only more than their equal in terms of intelligence and ability but also a potential writer of genius. She speaks vividly on the ambiguities of being a governess in a letter to her sister Emily, first acknowledging the attractions of living in the home of wealthy people: “The country, the house, and the grounds are . . . divine.” However, for her none of this was available. Working as a governess took all her time. Viewing her as an employee drawing wages, the woman of the house, responsible to her husband to be an able manager of the staff and its expenses, Mrs. Sidgwick wasn’t interested in befriending as an equal this poor clergyman’s daughter or even in engaging her in conversation. Instead, like a good midcentury Victorian factory owner, she wanted to get as much work out of Charlotte, per hour, as she could. Of Mrs. Sidgwick Charlotte writes, “[she] . . . does not know my character & she does not wish to know it. I have never had five minutes of conversation with her since I came – except when she was scolding me . . . ” What galls Brontë is not only Sidgwick’s bossiness but also and, more importantly, her indifference to Charlotte as a person. And so when one of the Sidgwick children at dinner one day put his hand in Charlotte’s saying, “I love ‘ou, Miss Brontë,” the mother broke in, before all the children in a tone of disdain, “Love the governess, my dear!”

  Winifred Gérin, in her beautifully written biography of Brontë, pictures Charlotte in the Sidgwick’s handsome country home during a “long summer evening when she sat alone, her lap filled with Mrs. Sidgwick’s ‘oceans of needlework’ . . . no one from the noisy self-absorbed house-party below to share her solitude.” Gérin goes on to tell us of Charlotte’s private space, which she herself had explored.

  Charlotte’s bedroom . . . had deep window seats and Georgian panes to its window-frames, and through them a lonely girl could look down unobserved on the arrivals and departures, the gentlemen on their horses and the ladies in their carriages, that animated the summer scene.

  Judging herself to be the plausibly lively and witty equal of these people, Brontë could only feel the pain of her solitude. Her months at Stonegappe were, then, largely unhappy ones, despite her expensive accommodation and a “holiday” with the family in a residence near the opulent spa resort of Harrowgate. Charlotte left this employment in July.

  What we now see is how much Brontë drew from these experiences as she began to write Jane Eyre, including the stone-throwing son, the feelings of alienation and solitude, and, most poignantly, the experience of a well-appointed, comfortable country home in which, like Jane Eyre later, Charlotte from the upper rooms watched people happily enjoying themselves utterly oblivious to her and to what she might have to offer.

  Curiously and significantly, Brontë used her experiences of subordination, exploitation, and humiliation not for Jane Eyre’s work as a governess, which she describes as easy and pleasant, but instead for Jane’s much earlier experiences at Gateshead Hall. The most dramatic instance is the way she transforms Mrs. Sidgwick into Mrs. Reed. This is Mrs. Reed: “A woman of robust frame, square-shouldered and strong-limbed.” She has a large face, “the under-jaw being much developed and very solid.” Her brow is “low, her chin large and prominent.” She dresses well and has “a presence and port calculated to set off handsome attire.” Typically, Brontë, with her lifelong interest in issues such as phrenology and the relationship of body to sensibility, finds revelation in the close scrutiny of the physical details of this woman. Her intractable will, narrow range of mind, and proclivity to dominance emerge in her jaw, brow, and shoulders, which project her authority and power to, paradoxically, the point of a calculated physical attraction. She is someone not of conspicuous intelligence or culture, but rather clever in managing others, and so keeping them “under her control.” All of this—her physical characteristics, her insistence upon dominance, her categorical indifference to Jane, are a fictional reworking of Charlotte’s powerfully antagonistic responses to Mrs. Sidgwick. For the thin, short, plain Jane—as for Brontë who was physically just like her—Mrs. Reed made a formidable adversary.

  Charlotte left the Sidgewicks on July 13, 1839, but by the end of the year she writes that she will probably have to take another situation even though, as she insists, “. . . I hate and abhor the very thoughts of governess-ship.”

  This prediction turned out to be accurate. Early in 1841 she arrived at Upperwood House, Rawdon, to care for two quite young children of the White family. As nursery governess caring for small children, Charlotte faced never-ending calls upon her time and attention—demands she had never faced before. Unsurprisingly her letters were soon full of laments. She complains the children are “wild and unbroken.” She found it impossible to fit comfortably into family life, wishing to “repel the rude familiarity of the children” while at the same time finding it difficult “to ask either servant or mistress for anything I want.” Soon she again found herself in angry opposition to a powerful older woman. She acknowledges in a letter that she’s been able to tolerate Mrs. White’s bad manners and boastfulness and even her lack of education—demonstrated in her inability to write and spell correctly. But “I have had experience of one little trait in her character which condemns her a long way with me— . . . If any little thing goes wrong she does not scruple to give way to anger in a very coarse unladylike manner . . . [that] is highly offensive.” By August playing the role of governess is becoming insupportable: “it is the living in other people’s houses—the estrangement from one’s real character—the adoption of a cold, rigid, apathetic exterior, that is painful . . . ” Charlotte left the Whites in December but more amicably than her separation from the ­Sidgwicks, with expressions of gratitude on both sides.

  Charlotte Brontë’s unsuccessful efforts to find herself a suitable “situation” continued. In February of 1842, just a couple of m
onths after leaving the Whites, Charlotte and her sister Emily traveled to Brussels to study French. At ages twenty-five and twenty-four, they were considerably older than the other pupils, native speakers of French. Charlotte characterized them to Ellen Nussey as “singularly cold, selfish, animal and inferior . . . their principles are rotten to the core.” This Yorkshire Protestant found the young Roman Catholic Belgians immediately antipathetic. Nevertheless, by August Madame Heger was sufficiently impressed by this strange pair of young women from Yorkshire to persuade them to stay on at the school as part-time teachers of English and music as well as continue their studies in French to the end of the year.

  This return to the role of teacher became the basis for Charlotte’s first novel, The Professor, which she wrote upon her return to England. Rather than telling this story from her own, female, perspective, Brontë adopted a first-person male narrator named Crimsworth. For many years, she had written in the voice of a male narrator in the fantasy fictions about Angria that she shared with her brother Branwell, so this strategy of adopting a man’s perspective was nothing new for her. This narrator, Crimsworth, just like Charlotte, leaves England to teach in Brussels. Like Agnes Grey and the future Jane Eyre, he is at first excited about his new life. “Liberty,” he says anticipating Jane’s later desire, “I clasped in my arms for the first time and her smile and embrace revived my life.” All too soon, however, he finds himself shocked by his female students. Though they are supposedly reared “in utter unconsciousness of vice,” these girls take on an “air of bold, imprudent flirtation” with their male teacher, and he soon comes to the conclusion that “the root of this precocious impurity . . . is to be found in the discipline, if not the doctrines of the Church of Rome.” His assessment: “the mass of them [were] mentally depraved.”