Martina Devlin on Brontëmania

Hands up, I have a Brontë obsession, and I’m not alone because there’s a term for it: Brontëmania. It manifests itself in minor ways, such as drinking coffee every day from a mug with ‘No coward soul is mine’ (Emily) around its rim and reading by a lamp with a Jane Eyre shade. But I also respect the work: all their novels, dogeared from reading, are lined up on my bookshelves.  

Long before I thought of writing a Brontë novel, I visited Haworth to walk where the three sisters walked and see what their eyes saw. Years passed, and I made the trip to Yorkshire a second time, on this occasion for research. As I followed the guide about Haworth Parsonage Museum, I was studying the table where they wrote their masterpieces, the tiny-waisted gowns they wore, views from the windows.

Material culture appeals to the novelist in me. That treasure trove of personal objects belonging to the family fired my imagination; seeing them reinforced my resolve to write about the Brontës. The sisters’ laptop desks, pen nibs, ink pots and manuscripts, including precocious miniature books written, illustrated and handsewn by the four Brontë children, are reminders of a family with a genius for storytelling. Their belongings, used, mended and cherished, conjured up pictures in my head.

For me, Brontëmania begins with Jane Eyre, Charlotte’s debut novel. Emily’s Wuthering Heights is the most original and Anne’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall the most radical, but in Jane, Charlotte imagined into being one of fiction’s truly memorable female characters. That unconventional governess is fiercely courageous, outspoken and independent. My views on would-be bigamist Mr Rochester have shifted over the years, and not to his advantage, but my admiration for Jane remains constant. 

She insisted on life on her own terms, and told her employer:

I am no bird and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will.

You may recognise the quote from tote bags and T-shirts, but look for it in the novel – it’s Jane’s expression of self-respect; even for a life of comfort, she refuses to be caged. And that feminist mission statement originates with Charlotte. No wonder this work of fiction has made an indelible impression since its first appearance in 1847. ‘Reader, I married him’ – the reader addressed directly – still electrifies today. It’s a sentence shot through with power. Consider that pronoun: she chooses to marry him. Nothing passive about our Jane.

The novel continues to inspire other books – my own novel included – films, television, theatre, musical and dance adaptations. Some are faithful to the facts and some highly fanciful, but all exist because Jane Eyre has taken such a hold on the imagination. My favourite is the prequel, Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, but I enjoy all the Brontë reboots, murder-mysteries included.

Those of us in the Brontëmania camp are as fascinated by the lives of the Brontës as their art. But this involves negotiating a persistent Brontë misrepresentation: doomed sisters living in the back of beyond under the yoke of a tyrannical father. However, Haworth was no backwater and their letters showcase their wit, talent and enjoyment of life. As for their Irish father, Co Down-born Patrick Brontë (who went by Brunty until his move to England as an ambitious young man), he gave them the run of his library, fostered their education and encouraged them to use their minds and earn their own living.

Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall have an Irish hinterland, crammed with Gothic hardware including apparitions, supernatural or mysterious happenings, brooding, isolated houses and equally brooding, flawed protagonists. The Brontë children were reared on their father’s Irish ghost tales, and imbibed Ireland’s oral storytelling tradition from him.

Patrick was tenacious and hardworking, a self-made man who managed to earn a degree from Cambridge despite humble origins. The sisters were equally determined in their quest for publication and rejection was no deterrent.“Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life,” the poet laureate Robert Southey told Charlotte when she sent him her poems. She ignored his patriarchal putdown and proceeded to make it her business, as did Emily and Anne.

Charlotte despatched Jane Eyre to the London publishing house of Smith, Elder & Co in late August 1847 and by mid-October her novel was published. The circulating libraries were first to spot its narrative intensity. The speed with which Jane Eyre went from handwritten manuscript to printed book (about six weeks) still astounds me today. Charlotte used the pseudonym Currer Bell because she wanted to “walk invisible” although her identity eventually leaked out. Two months later, Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey were also published under pseudonyms, Ellis Bell and Acton Bell aka Emily and Anne. Eighteen forty-seven was a bumper year for fiction!

However, the subsequent year was a traumatic one for Charlotte. While working on her follow-up novel Shirley, her alcoholic and drug-addicted brother Branwell died in September 1848. Emily followed him into the family vault in December, dying “in a time of promise” as Charlotte put it, and five months later, in May 1849, Anne also succumbed to TB. The last surviving Brontë sibling could have surrendered to despair, but kept writing.

“Take courage,” Anne told her sister on her deathbed, and Charlotte carved out her own destiny, in 1845 setting aside Patrick’s objections to her marriage and accepting a proposal from his Irish curate. Their union was a practical step which secured her father’s future, but she also had a passionate desire for love in her life, and Arthur Bell Nicholls proved himself devoted to her. Co Antrim born and Co Offaly raised, he wanted to show Ireland to Charlotte, and took her there on a month-long honeymoon. They began their holiday in Conwy in Wales, crossed at Holyhead to Dún Laoghaire for several days in Dublin, then onwards to Arthur’s home, Cuba Court in Banagher. From there, they visited Kilkee in Clare, Kerry and Cork. 

In letters back to England she wrote about the Bell family in Cuba Court, the cousins among whom Arthur was raised. “I was very much pleased with all I saw, but I was also greatly surprised to find so much English order and repose in the family habits and arrangements. I had heard a great deal about Irish negligence.” No wonder Arthur had anxieties about how outspoken she was in letters!

Charlotte died nine months after that happy marriage, in 1855. Six years later, following his father-in-law’s death, Arthur packed up his mementos of Charlotte and returned to Banagher. A wealth of memorabilia – portraits, samplers, sewing boxes, letters and bonnets – lay undisturbed in Banagher for decades, even as the Brontë myth put down roots. After Arthur died in 1906, a series of auctions took place, and some of those poignant artefacts preserved in Ireland are now on show in Haworth Parsonage Museum – the perfect setting for them.

As for the three Brontë sisters who encouraged one another, dared to dream and worked to make their hopes a reality: long dead they may be, but they live on in their novels.