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Although Charlotte Brontë is one of the most famous Victorian women writers, only two of her poems are widely read today, and these are not her best or most interesting poems. Like her contemporary Elizabeth Barrett Browning, she experimented with the poetic forms that became the characteristic modes of the Victorian period—the long narrative poem and the dramatic monologue—but unlike Browning, Brontë gave up writing poetry at the beginning of her professional career, when she became identified in the public mind as the author of the popular novel Jane Eyre (1847). Included in this novel are the two songs by which most people know her poetry today. Brontë's decision to abandon poetry for novel writing exemplifies the dramatic shift in literary tastes and the marketability of literary genres—from poetry to prose fiction—that occurred in the 1830s and 1840s. Her experience as a poet thus reflects the dominant trends in early Victorian literary culture and demonstrates her centrality to the history of nineteenth-century literature.
Introduction
Although Charlotte Brontë is one of the most famous Victorian women writers, only two of her poems are widely read today, and these are not her best or most interesting poems. Like her contemporary Elizabeth Barrett Browning, she experimented with the poetic forms that became the characteristic modes of the Victorian period—the long narrative poem and the dramatic monologue—but unlike Browning, Brontë gave up writing poetry at the beginning of her professional career, when she became identified in the public mind as the author of the popular novel Jane Eyre (1847). Included in this novel are the two songs by which most people know her poetry today. Brontë's decision to abandon poetry for novel writing exemplifies the dramatic shift in literary tastes and the marketability of literary genres—from poetry to prose fiction—that occurred in the 1830s and 1840s. Her experience as a poet thus reflects the dominant trends in early Victorian literary culture and demonstrates her centrality to the history of nineteenth-century literature.
Charlotte Brontë was born on 21 April 1816 in
the village of Thornton, West Riding, Yorkshire. Her father, Patrick
Brontë, was the son of a respectable Irish farmer in County Down, Ireland.
As the eldest son in a large family, Patrick normally would have found
his life's work in managing the farm he was to inherit; instead, he
first became a school teacher and a tutor and, having attracted the
attention of a local patron, acquired training in the classics and was
admitted to St. John's College at Cambridge in 1802. He graduated in
1806 and was ordained as a priest in the Church of England in 1807.
In addition to writing the sermons he regularly delivered, Patrick Brontë
was also a minor poet, publishing his first book of verse, Cottage Poems, in 1811.
His rise from modest beginnings can be attributed largely to his considerable
talent, hard work, and steady ambition—qualities his daughter Charlotte
clearly inherited.
Charlotte's mother, Maria Branwell Brontë, died when her daughter was
only five years old. Born to a prosperous tea merchant and grocer, Maria
Branwell was raised in Penzance, Cornwall, married Patrick Brontë in
1812, bore six children in seven years—Maria (1813), Elizabeth (1815),
Charlotte (1816), Patrick Branwell (1817), Emily (1818), and Anne (1820)—and
died of cancer at the age of thirty-eight. Though the loss of their
mother certainly made a difference in the lives of all the Brontë children,
the younger ones—Charlotte, Branwell, Emily, and Anne—seem not to
have been seriously affected by her death. A remarkably observant child
with a good memory, Charlotte nevertheless remembered little of her
mother; when, as an adult, she read letters that her mother had written
to her father during their courtship, she wrote to a friend on 16 February
1850, "I wish She had lived and that I had known her."
In 1824, when she was eight years old, Charlotte and Emily joined their
older sisters at the newly opened Clergy Daughters' School at Cowan
Bridge in the parish of Tunstall. Although later made infamous by Charlotte's
scathing depiction of "Lowood School" inJane Eyre, Cowan Bridge
had, in fact, much to recommend it to Patrick Brontë's notice. Having
five daughters and one son to educate on a small income, he clearly
qualified as a "necessitous clergy" and, moreover, he would
have found the mission of the school compatible with his expectations
for his daughters. According to a December 1823 advertisement in the Leeds Intelligencer, the aim of the school
was to provide a "plain and useful Education" that would allow
young women "to maintain themselves in the different Stations of
Life to which Providence may call them" and to offer "a more
liberal Education for any who may be sent to be educated as Teachers
and Governesses." Patrick Brontë's decision to send his four eldest
daughters to Cowan Bridge thus reflects his concern for their material
as well as intellectual and spiritual welfare, a concern that he passed
on to Charlotte, who of the three Brontë sisters that survived to adulthood
came to feel most anxious about her need to establish herself in a fulfilling
and yet economically viable career.
Charlotte Brontë's earliest experience with school life could not have
made teaching seem an attractive career. As Juliet Barker notes in The Brontës (1994), the record of her abilities
in the school register hardly suggests that her potential was noticed:
"Reads tolerably—Writes indifferently—Ciphers [arithmetic]
a little and works [sews] neatly. Knows nothing of Grammar, Geography,
History or Accomplishments [such as music, drawing, French]." Since
the assessment of every other student is essentially the same, the register
tells little about Charlotte but certainly reveals that Cowan Bridge
was unlikely to recognize individual talent, much less foster it. The
evaluation concludes with a telling comment: "Altogether clever
for her age but knows nothing systematically."
Charlotte found the rigors of boarding school life harsh in the extreme.
Food was badly prepared under unsanitary conditions and, as a consequence,
outbreaks of "low fever," or typhus, forced the withdrawal
of many students, some of whom died. Maria developed consumption while
at Cowan Bridge and was harshly treated during her incapacitating illness,
an incident Charlotte drew upon in portraying Helen Burns's martyrdom
at the hands of Miss Scatcherd in Jane Eyre. Patrick Brontë
was not informed of his eldest daughter's condition until February 1825,
two months after Maria began to show symptoms; when he saw her, he immediately
withdrew her from the school and she died at home in early May. Elizabeth,
in the meantime, had also fallen ill. When the entire school was temporarily
removed on doctor's orders to a healthier site by the sea, Elizabeth
was escorted back to Haworth where she died two weeks after Charlotte
and Emily were brought home by their father on June 1.
The loss of Elizabeth and Maria profoundly affected Charlotte's life
and probably helped shape her personality as well. Suddenly becoming
the eldest child in a motherless family forced her into a position of
leadership and instilled in her a sometimes almost overwhelming sense
of responsibility, one that conflicted with a streak of rebelliousness
and personal ambition. From this point on, Charlotte took the lead in
the children's activities, a position of sibling dominance that she
maintained throughout their lives and literary careers.
Following the tragic experience at Cowan Bridge, Patrick Brontë tutored
his four remaining children at home and provided them with music and
art instruction from competent teachers. The children were responsive
scholars who also read avidly on their own and continued their imaginative
play under Charlotte's direction. They were allowed to choose freely
from their father's library, which included requisite family reading
such as John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress (1678-1684), Hannah More's Moral Sketches (1784), John Milton's Paradise Lost (1667), Sir
Walter Scott's The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), James Thomson's The Seasons (1726-1730),
and, of course, the Bible. The family regularly received Blackwood's Magazine,
which heavily influenced Charlotte and Branwell's early writing, and,
beginning in 1832, Fraser's Magazine For Town and
Country, both lively and influential conservative periodicals
with a heavy emphasis on literature. The Brontës also apparently had
access to the library at Ponden House, a private residence nearby, and
belonged to the Keighley Mechanics' Institute library as well as one
or more of the local circulating libraries that carried popular contemporary
novels and poetry.
The seminal event of the Brontës' literary apprenticeship occurred
on 5 June 1826, when Mr. Brontë returned from a trip to Leeds with
a present for Branwell--a box of toy soldiers--to which all four children
immediately laid claim. Each child selected a soldier as his or her
own and, naming them for their respective childhood heroes (Charlotte's
was the Duke of Wellington), they began to construct plays and narratives
around and through the voices of these characters. The earliest of such
works were written in an almost microscopic hand in minuscule manuscripts
so they would be compatible in size with their supposed authors--the
toy soldiers.
Charlotte Brontë's juvenile tales revolve around the imagined adventures
of the Duke of Wellington's two sons, Charles and Arthur Wellesley,
and the social elite of "Glass Town," later transformed into
the kingdom of "Angria." Arthur, soon elevated to the "Duke
of Zamorna," is a recognizably Byronic hero who engages in romantic
intrigues as well as in political treachery; his younger brother Charles
is a less powerful, often humorous figure, who spies and reports on
the scandalous doings of his Angrian compatriots--particularly his brother
and his many paramours. Both Wellesleys are authors, and it is significant
that Brontë's attractive but morally reprehensible Duke of Zamorna
develops into the poet of the family while Charles emerges as a storyteller
and her favorite narrator.
These early tales not only reveal the themes that preoccupied Brontë
as a young writer and which reemerge in her adult writing--themes of
romantic passion and sexual politics, desire, betrayal, loyalty, and
revenge--but also reflect her early awareness of an issue central to
early Victorian literary culture: the concern that poetry writing was
a self-indulgent and even morally questionable activity. Romantically
alluring but destructively egotistical, Brontë's "self-concentered"
poet-duke is one of the means by which she represents her own early
ambivalence about being a poet. This ambivalence--also experienced by
male Victorian poets such as Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, and Matthew Arnold--was surely later intensified by
social proscriptions against feminine subjectivity.
While the juvenile writings of the Brontës have been justly compared
to fantasies, they were not merely uninformed imaginings. For example,
early stories such as "A Romantic Tale," dated 15 April 1829,
reflect the young writers' familiarity with articles on British colonizing
in Africa published by Blackwood's Magazine in
1826 as well as more expected sources such as the Bible (especially
the Book of Revelations), standard educational texts such as J. Goldsmith's Grammar of General Geography (1825), the
works of Bunyan, the Arabian Nights Entertainments,
and Tales of the Genii (1820)
by Sir Charles Morell (pseudonym of James Ridley).
Characters in the children's stories debate contemporary issues such
as the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829, indulge in political gossip
about prominent figures such as the Duke of Wellington, and conduct
military campaigns informed by the children's knowledge of actual military
engagements such as the Peninsular War, 1808-1814. The fictitious setting
for the tales, supposedly on the coast of West Africa, owes much to
the popular oriental cityscape paintings of John Martin, and the Angrians
are based on contemporary engravings that Charlotte patiently copied
from such books as Finden's Illustrations of the
Life and Works of Lord Byron (1833-1834) and popular annuals such
as The Literary Souvenir.
By 1829 Branwell was "editing" Branwell's Blackwood's Magazine--the
title changed, ironically, to Blackwood's Young Men's Magazine when
Charlotte assumed editorship seven months later--and the two collaborators
were producing tiny, hand-sewn volumes that imitate in striking detail Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, the original
upon which they were based. Like their prototype, Charlotte and Branwell's
magazines are gatherings of writings in various genres--plays, stories,
poems, imagined conversations, letters, sketches, anecdotes, essays--and
include the advertising, editorial notes, and information about publication
and marketing that are typically found in such periodicals. Reproducing
the material form of Blackwood's Magazine,
Charlotte and Branwell also engaged in literary gossip and controversies
like those they learned about through their reading, filling the pages
of their narratives with literary reviews and vituperative personal
exchanges between Glass Town literati.
It was during this early period of playful yet intense immersion in
make-believe literary life that Charlotte Brontë first experimented
with poetry. Producing sixty-five poems and a satirical play about poetry
writing in 1829-1830, the fourteen-year-old self-consciously attempted
to define herself as a poet. Though most of these early poems have a
Glass Town context, being embedded within her narratives and spoken
or sung by fictitious characters, some are only loosely connected to
the stories. Many are interesting in that they reveal Brontë's exposure
to current literary debates such as those concerning "neglected
genius," the role of tradition and imitation versus originality
and inspiration, and the public reception of poetry in a changing literary
economy. The various poetic forms that Brontë experimented with during
this time reflect her self-designed apprenticeship through imitation
of earlier poets. For example, her many descriptions of natural landscapes
are indebted to the eighteenth-century topographical poem that had been
developed by "nature poets" such as James Thomson and William Wordsworth. Also, the influence of the popular Thomas Moorecan be seen in Brontë's many poems
written as songs.
Brontë deliberately imitates Thomas Gray's "Progress of Poetry"
(1754) in "The Violet," dated 14 November 1830, in which she
traces the history of Western literature beginning with Homer and then
beseeches admission to that "bright band" of poets who have
preceded her:
Hail army of immortals hail!
Oh Might I neath your banners march!
Though faint my lustre faint & pale
Scarce seen amid the glorious arch
Yet joy deep joy would fill my heart
Nature unveil thy awful face
To me a poets pow'r impart
Thoug humble be my destined place
Such an early poem of course reflects Brontë's poetic immaturity as
well as her enthusiasm for her chosen métier. In other pieces Brontë
shows the ability to view her own literary pretensions with humorous
detachment.
Although the early poems contain visionary, lyre-playing bards and other
romantic poet-figures, Brontë in her stories and plays repeatedly
satirizes the romantic conception of the poet as a self-inspired original
genius. She deploys parodic characters, such as Henry Rhymer in "The
Poetaster," a story dated 6-12 July 1830, to debunk her own romantic
posturing and that of her siblings. "The Poetaster" also humorously
depicts the changing literary culture of England in the 1830s, a time
when technological advances in printing allowed for the entry of many
new writers into the literary marketplace. The "noble profession
[of authorship] is dishonoured," wails a Glass Town publisher who
soon expects to see "every child that walks along the streets,
bearing its manuscripts in its hand, going to the printers for publication."
Making fun of her own and her siblings' precocious literary aspirations,
Brontë shows a good-humored awareness of both the opportunities
and the complexities involved in pursuing a literary career in her day.
This spate of poetic production was interrupted in January 1831, when
Brontë left Haworth for a second time, traveling twenty miles to become
a student at Roe Head School in Mirfield, near Dewsbury. Owned and run
by Margaret Wooler, whom her father called a "clever, decent, and
motherly woman," Roe Head was a small school that usually enrolled
only about seven boarding students at a time, all girls around the same
age, and therefore was able to attend closely to the needs and abilities
of individuals. Although Brontë was initially homesick and isolated
from the other students because of her differences from them--her outdated
dress, slightly eccentric behavior occasioned by poor eyesight and timidity,
and her ignorance of grammar and geography as well as her precocious
knowledge of literature and the visual arts--in time she won the respect
and affection of her peers and came to feel quite at home in her new
school environment.
At Roe Head, Brontë made two contrasting yet equally enduring friendships.
One friend was Ellen Nussey, an entirely conventional and affectionately
loyal girl with whom Brontë corresponded throughout her life. After
the writer's death, Nussey jealously guarded her friend's reputation,
in part by heavily editing her letters. Brontë's other friend, Mary
Taylor, was as radical as Nussey was conservative. Boisterous, intelligently
opinionated, and more intellectual than Nussey, Taylor apparently appealed
to the bright, rebellious, and ambitious side of Brontë. Late in her
life Taylor published The First Duty of Women (1870),
in which she argued that the first priority for women should be to prepare
to support themselves financially. She had acted upon this conviction
in 1845 by immigrating to New Zealand, where she ran a successful business
as a shopkeeper until she returned to England in 1860 to live out her
life in comfortable economic independence. It is unfortunate that only
one of the many letters that Brontë wrote to Taylor survives.
Although she was considerably behind most of the other girls when she
entered the school, Brontë quickly moved to the top of the class and
stayed there until she left eighteen months later, carrying away several
prizes and medals awarded for outstanding academic achievement. Often
continuing her studies while the other girls were relaxing at the end
of the day, Brontë apparently recognized that her education was a necessary
investment in the future: she was not attending Miss Wooler's establishment
merely to gain polish but rather to train herself for a career as a
governess. Due to her dedication to her studies she wrote only three
poems during her time at the school.
After her departure from Roe Head in May 1832, the rather uneventful
round of life at Haworth, where she was in charge of her younger sisters'
educations, eventually led Brontë back to the exciting world of Angria
and the occupation of writing. From 1833 to 1834 she produced approximately
2,200 lines of poetry, most of it tightly embedded within the context
of the passionate tales that she and Branwell were spinning around the
political and romantic experiences of their beloved Angrians. Many of
these poems are songs whose meaning and effect depend on a knowledge
not only of the subject matter alluded to but also of the singer's character
and the situation in which the lyric is sung. Other poems are lengthy
narratives that develop the Angrian saga, deepening and sometimes complicating
the plots developed in the accompanying prose narratives. These poems
are formally more competent than the ones she produced prior to her
stay at Roe Head, but they also show less willingness to experiment
with poetic form and more absorption in the characters and content of
the tales. The literary self-reflectiveness of her earlier writing gave
way to an almost total absorption in the Angrian world of fantasy, with
its emphasis on military conflict (largely Branwell's contribution)
and romantic betrayal (Charlotte's main interest).
The few exceptions to Brontë's Angrian writings include a group of
poems written in normal-sized script on lined paper, apparently from
the same notebook, and preceded by instructions from her father: "All
that is written in this book, must be in a good, plain and legible hand. PB."
Several of these non-Angrian poems--"Richard Coeur de Lion &
Blondel," "Death of Darius Codomanus," and "Saul"--may
suggest that Brontë recognized the need to develop a public poetic
mode to complement the private writing she and her siblings indulged
in their literary fantasies. Thus, evidence of conflict in Brontë's
poetry emerges in a way that connects literary differences--in poetic
modes, voices, subject matters, even penmanship--with a perceived division
between the private life of communication with a coterie audience, her
siblings, and a public life of responsibility to authority figures,
such as her father and teachers (the poems on historical and Biblical
figures are similar to school exercises she later wrote in Brussels).
This division eventually led Brontë to abandon poetry for prose fiction,
but not until she had gained significant poetic skill and struggled
through much anxiety related to this perceived conflict between the
lure of the private imagination and the call of public duty.
The decision that Brontë should return to Roe Head as a teacher in
July 1835 certainly contributed to this anxiety since there was little
opportunity to "play out" the Angrian tales at Miss Wooler's
school. As her journal testifies, Brontë grew increasingly resentful
of what she saw as her "wretched bondage" to the teaching
profession, with its long hours, lack of privacy, and tedious duties.
She was able to write only in snatches and during vacations, so it is
not surprising that her rate of production at this period fell well
below that of her partner, Branwell, who installed himself in a Halifax
studio with the intent of earning his living as a portrait painter and
who found considerable time for both writing and socializing.
Brontë's poems after her return to Roe Head reflect her longing for
home and for Angria as well as her anxious need to reconcile her desire
to write with the necessity of continuing to teach to earn a living.
The most famous of these poems, sometimes anthologized as "Retrospection,"
begins poignantly:
We wove a web in childhood
A web of sunny air
We dug a spring in infancy
Of water pure and fair
We sowed in youth a mustard seed
We cut an almond rod
We are now grown up to riper age
Are they withered in the sod. . . .
The poem continues for 177 more lines, developing into vividly realized
scenes featuring the Duke of Zamorna. The poem then breaks into a retrospective
prose narrative that is rudely interrupted by "a voice that dissipated
all the charm" as a student "thrust her little rough black
head into [her teacher's] face" to demand, "Miss Brontë
what are you thinking about?"--a striking example of the incompatibility
of Brontë's inner, imaginative life with her actual experience while
at Roe Head.
Gradually, Brontë was able to resume a pace of writing comparable to
that of her earlier productive times, but even when she was writing
prolifically there is evidence of distraction and dissatisfaction. The
stories of 1836, for example, show that she was often unable to settle
on a subject or identify new topics to write about, and many poems from
this period end abruptly or trail off rather than draw to a close. Poems
such as "But Once Again . . . ," dated 19 January 1836, explicitly
articulate Brontë's concern about the conflict between the demands
of her teaching career and her desire for romantic, social, and intellectual
stimulation, which she associated with the imaginary world of Angria
and, especially, with her poet-duke, who emerges as an enthralling poetic
muse in the poem:
I mean Zamorna!
. . . he has been a mental King
That ruled my thoughts right regally
And he has given me a steady spring
To what I had of poetry.
. . . I've heard his accents sweet & stern
Speak words of kindled wrath to me
When dead as dust in funeral urn
Sank every note of melody
And I was forced to wake again
The silent song the slumbering strain.
. . . to his altar I am bound
For him the consecrated ground
My pilgrim steps have trod
. . . grovelling in the dust I fall
Where Adrian's shrine lamps dazzling glow. . . .
In December of 1836 Brontë decided to try her hand at professional
writing, with the hope of earning her living as a publishing poet. To
this end she sought the advice of no less a figure than Robert Southey,
then poet laureate of England, to whom she sent a selection of her poems.
The discouraging response in his letter of 12 March 1837 has become
infamous:
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
she will have for it, even as an accomplishment & a recreation.
To those duties you have not yet been called, & when you are you
will be less eager for celebrity.
Brontë's reply to Southey and the fact that she preserved his letter
in a wrapper inscribed "Southey's Advice | To be kept forever"
seem to suggest that she submitted to his masculine authority, but her
prodigious literary output during this period, particularly of poetry,
tells a different story. Between January 1837 and July 1838 Brontë
wrote more than sixty poems and verse fragments, including drafts of
what were eventually to be some of her best poetical works. However,
they remained fragmentary and defective; it was not until 1845 that
she was able to revise them into poems she was willing to publish.
Brontë left Roe Head for good in December 1838 and spent the next four
years attempting to reconcile her need to earn a living with her desire
to remain at Haworth and write. She accepted two positions as a governess,
working for the Sidgwick family in nearby Lothersdale from May to July
in 1839 and for the Whites at Upperwood House in Rawdon from March to
December 1841. Both experiences ended badly, largely because she could
not accommodate herself to her situation.
In the summer of 1841 Brontë began negotiations for a loan from
Aunt Branwell to establish a school that she and her sisters might operate.
In December she declined Miss Wooler's generous proposal that she replace
her as director of Roe Head, turning down a fine opportunity to take
charge of an established school with a good reputation. This remarkably
bad business decision is explained by her having become committed in
the meantime to a new and more exciting plan suggested to her by Mary
Taylor: that she and Emily attend school on the Continent in order to
improve their command of French and Italian, and acquire "a dash
of German" so to attract students to the school they would open
upon their return. Inspired by Taylor's descriptions of Europe and emboldened
by the Taylors' presence in Brussels, where she intended to study, on
29 September 1841 Brontë wrote a letter to Aunt Branwell in a manner
characteristic of her self-confident mood.
Charlotte and Emily Brontë left England in February 1842 to enroll
as the oldest students in a school run by Madame Claire Zoë Heger and
her husband, Constantin. English and Protestant in a school of Roman
Catholic Belgians, the Brontës were isolated from their younger peers
by differences in language, culture, age, and faith, not to mention
Emily's austere reserve and Charlotte's social timidity. Although both
young women made considerable academic progress in Brussels and were
praised for their success, neither ever felt entirely comfortable there,
and when they went back to Haworth for Aunt Branwell's funeral in November
1842, Emily chose not to return to Brussels.
For Charlotte Brontë, though, there was an attraction at the Pensionnnat
Heger beyond the opportunity for academic achievement; or rather, such
achievement was inextricably involved for her with the attractive presence
of Constantin Heger. He was an excellent teacher of literature, who,
unlike Southey, encouraged Brontë's literary talent, giving her close,
individual attention and challenging her to clarify her thinking about
writing as well as to refine her writing skills. In the essays she wrote
under Heger's direction, Brontë returned to the literary issues raised
in her earliest poems with a new sense of urgency. To her Romantic insistence
on the spontaneity of poetic "genius, [which] produces without
work," Heger wrote extensive marginal notes, arguing for the neoclassical
values of control, learning, and imitation. He did not simply dismiss
Romantic ideas about genius and poetic creativity as Brontë had often
done when she was younger; rather, he took such arguments seriously
and patiently explained the need for mechanical expertise and careful
craftsmanship in her writing.
Although she apparently composed little new poetry in Brussels, Brontë
did continue to transcribe revised versions of earlier poems into a
copybook she had brought with her from Haworth, an indication that she
may have been contemplating publishing them in the future. Encouraged
in her literary efforts as she had never been before, Brontë's regard
for Heger quickly developed into a grateful infatuation with the man
whom she addressed in a 24 July 1844 letter as "my literature master
. . . the only master that I have ever had." Understandably, Madame
Heger soon tried to put some distance between her husband and his interesting
English pupil. Hurt and angry, Brontë withdrew from the Belgian school
in January 1844 and returned to England nursing her wounded pride and
unrequited affections.
The letters she wrote to Heger from Haworth in 1844 painfully display
her feelings for "Monsieur," while at the same time they reveal
Brontë's increasing anxiety about establishing herself in a fulfilling
line of work. Always troubled by extreme nearsightedness, she experienced
a temporary further weakening of her sight at this time, writing Heger,
a bit histrionically, that since too much writing would result in blindness
"a literary career is closed to
me--only that of teaching is open to me." In November the
Brontë sisters abandoned their plan for opening a school in Haworth
since not one prospective applicant had responded to their advertisements.
The eldest Brontë's prospects--romantic, professional, and literary--seemed
dim indeed, and she sank into a state of hopeless lethargy.
Brontë suddenly recovered from this period of enervating depression
in the fall of 1845, when she stumbled upon a notebook of Emily's poems.
As she remarked in her "Biographical Notice" to the 1850 edition
of Wuthering Heights, she
recognized that these were "not common effusions, nor at all like
the poetry women generally write." She eagerly pressed her sister
to publish her poems with a selection of her own verse, to which were
added poems contributed by Anne. The sisters agreed to publish the poems
pseudonymously (perhaps at Emily and Anne's insistence), and Charlotte
Brontë energetically set about the task of finding a publisher for Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell (1846),
which the small London firm of Aylott & Jones agreed to print at
the authors' expense, a common practice for unknown writers.
Charlotte Brontë cheerfully took sole responsibility for corresponding
with their publisher and for seeing the Poems through the press;
as she later recorded in the "Biographical Notice," "the
mere effort to succeed had given a wonderful zest to existence; it must
be pursued." Her enthusiasm for the business end of authorship,
as well for its creative aspect, demonstrates her determination to succeed
as a professional author in the literary economy of early Victorian
England--a quality that she shared with successful contemporaries such
as her future biographer, Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell. It is a quality
that also explains why she wrote almost no poetry after 1845 and why
she was already attempting to secure a contract for her first novel,The Professor (1857), before the Poems had even appeared
in print.
Unlike her sisters' contributions, nearly all of Charlotte Brontë's
poems in the 1846 volume are reworkings of much earlier compositions,
mostly from the prolific period of 1837-1838, which she revised expressly
for publication in this volume. In preparing her poems Brontë not only
deleted all references to their original narrative contexts, as her
sisters did for their "Gondal poems"; she additionally changed
them to suit her new readership, invoking popular motifs (such as the
sailor's return in "The Wife's Will") and expressing sentiments
that were culturally resonate in 1846. For example, "Pilate's Wife's
Dream"--originally a monologue spoken by the Duchess of Zamorna
in a quite different fictitious situation--concludes with lines that
anticipate the final affirmation of faith expressed in Tennyson's In Memoriam (1850):
I feel a firmer trust--a higher hope
Rise in my soul--it dawns with dawning day;
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Ere night descends, I shall more surely know
What guide to follow, in what path to go;
I wait in hope--I wait in solemn fear,
The oracle of God--the sole--true God--to hear.
The poems that Brontë chose to present to the public in 1846 were
not composed spontaneously and "without work" but deliberately
altered to suit their new environment and purpose--a sure sign that
Brontë had begun to modify her Romantic notions about literary
genius and accommodate herself to the demands of professional authorship.
Because Charlotte Brontë's poems are longer than those of her sisters,
she contributed only nineteen to their twenty-one each, so that each
writer is given approximately the same amount of space in the book.
Each poem is clearly attributed to either "Currer," "Ellis,"
or "Acton," and the contributions by the three are presented
alternately, so that no one poet dominates any portion of the volume.
The effect invites comparison between the three writers and makes Emily's
superiority as a poet noticeable.
The arrangement of the poems also obscures a coherence between Charlotte
Brontë's poems, many of which are connected through continuing narrative
lines and/or through consistencies in character. For example, four of
her poems--"The Wife's Will," "The Wood," "Regret,"
and "Apostasy"--together constitute a single story of an English
wife who chooses to accompany her husband into political exile in France,
where she affirms at the end of her life a loyalty to her native faith,
the religion of romantic love:
'Tis my religion thus to love,
My creed thus fixed to be;
Not Death shall shake, nor Priestcraft break
My rock-like constancy!
Presented through extended monologues, this story effectively develops
the character of the speaker through four dramatically realized situations
in which she addresses an implied audience--William in the first three
poems, a French-Catholic priest in the last. These poems thus resemble
both the long narrative poem that was to become popular in Victorian
England--Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh (1857), for
example--but also the dramatic monologue, perhaps the most distinctively
Victorian poetic form, one refined by poets like Tennyson and the Brownings.
Other Brontë monologues include "Frances," "The Missionary,"
"Pilate's Wife's Dream," and "The Teacher's Monologue."
Some of Brontë's poems are clearly lyrical - the companion pieces "Evening
Solace" and "Winter Stores," for example--but most of
the poems have a narrative component. Such narrative poems as "Gilbert"
and "Mementoes," include Gothic elements like those that made Jane Eyre so popular; other poems, such
as "The Letter," use precise imagery and details of setting
to project a character's state of mind into his or her external environment,
much as she did later in her novels and as Tennyson did in poems such
as "Mariana." Others are linked together
through narrative compatibility: for instance, "Preference"
seems to be an indignant woman's response to the aggressive declaration
of love asserted by the male speaker of her preceding poem, "Passion";
and "Gilbert" seems to be exactly the kind of arrogant lover
who seduced and betrayed "Frances," whose troubled monologue
precedes the story in which he is brought to retributive justice (though
his victim is identified as "Elinor").
The sense of coherence in Charlotte Brontë's published poems derives
in part, of course, from their common origin in the juvenile writings,
which initiated the themes that appear so often in her novels; but their
unity is also due to formal similarities based on a new purpose in her
writing: to develop characters that are psychologically interesting
through monologues and narratives that reveal personality within the
context of dramatic situation. This purpose links the poems that Brontë
published in 1846 to the dominant poetic modes of the Victorian period--the
long narrative poem and the dramatic monologue--as well as to the literary
form by which she ultimately became identified as an author in the public
sphere: the novel.
Though Brontë made every effort to publicize Poems, paying for advertising
and requesting that Aylott & Jones send review copies to fourteen
periodicals, the volume sold poorly--only two copies in the first year--and
received only three reviews, which were, however, rather favorable.
Originally priced at 4 shillings, the volume was republished by the
publishers of Jane Eyre in 1848, and
received more insightful critical attention after the publication of
Gaskell's The Life of Charlotte Brontë in
1857. Though most critics have acknowledged the superiority of Emily
Brontë's poems, a few reviews published in 1848 to 1849, when Jane Eyre was selling very
well, favored Charlotte Brontë's; for example, the anonymous reviewer
for the 10 November 1849Britannia praised her "mastery
in the art of word painting" and her "faculty of exhibiting
in words the shadowy images of mental agony." E. S. Dallas, in
a July 1857 review in Blackwood's Magazine,
remarked that her poetry is distinguished from that of her sisters'
by her "faculty of forgetting herself, and talking of things and
persons exterior to herself"--a quality shared by novelists and
poets who write in the narrative and dramatic monologue forms. Brontë,
however, adamantly agreed with those who thought her sister's poetry
superior, and in a 26 September 1850 letter to Gaskell she dismissed
her own contributions to the 1846 volume as "juvenile productions;
the restless effervescence of a mind that would not be still."
In 1847, before she had secured her public reputation as a novelist,
Brontë sent presentation copies of Poems to several important
literary figures--a common strategy for unknown authors who wished to
attract the attention of influential critics. She also persistently
tried to publish her first novel, The Professor, which was
rejected nine times before she received an encouraging reply from the
firm of Smith, Elder, who declined to publish the book but asked to
review any other novel she might be working on. Heartened by this request,
Brontë finished Jane Eyre rapidly--in about
two weeks-- and had the satisfaction of seeing the novel in print shortly
thereafter. The book was immediately popular and "Currer Bell"
quickly became known by the reading public as "the author of Jane Eyre."
After the success of her novel, Brontë wrote no poetry except for three
unfinished poems on the occasions of her sisters' deaths. Though greatly
saddened by the tragically early deaths of Branwell (24 September 1848),
Emily (19 December 1848), and Anne (28 May 1849), she continued to publish
novels--Shirley in 1849, Villette in 1853-- and
enjoyed stimulating literary correspondences with several people, including
George Henry Lewes and William Smith Williams, the perceptive and kindly
reader for her publishing firm, Smith, Elder. Letting her identity become
known, she achieved the literary celebrity that Southey had warned her
to eschew and became acquainted with several important authors, including William Makepeace Thackeray, Harriett Martineau, and Gaskell.
At the age of thirty-eight, Brontë married her father's curate, Arthur
Bell Nichols and died, possibly of either hyperemesis gravidarum (severe
vomiting caused by pregnancy) or a serious infection of the digestive
tract, on 31 March 1855. She is buried, along with the rest of her remarkable
family (except for Anne, who died in the seaside town of Scarborough),
in the Church of St. Michael and All Angels, immediately across from
her parsonage home.
Сonclusion
Charlotte Brontë was not a
successful poet in her own day, and today she is still rightfully known
for her novels rather than for her poems. The inevitable comparisons
between Emily's terse romantic lyrics and her sister's more discursive
poetic style have produced a lower estimate of her poems than they probably
deserve. "Pilate's Wife's Dream," for example, is arguably
a much better poetic monologue than Elizabeth Barrett Browning's well-known
"The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point." Brontë is an
important figure in the history of nineteenth-century poetry because
her career illustrates the shift in literary tastes from poetry to prose
fiction and because she employed, sometimes quite skillfully, the poetic
modes that became characteristic of the Victorian period.
If one agrees with Virginia Woolf's claim in "'Jane Eyre' and 'Wuthering
Heights'" that Charlotte Brontë's novels are read "for her
poetry," one might argue that Brontë never did entirely abandon
her career as a poet. Adapting her creative impulses to the demands
of the market, Brontë incorporated poetic features into the more viable
form of the novel, and so became a successful literary professional
in Victorian England and a "major author" in the accepted
canon of British literature.
— Carol A. Bock, University of Minnesota, Duluth.
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