Books: The Cinderella Switch

CHARLOTTE BRONTE: THE EVOLUTION OF GENIUS by Winifred Gerin. 617 pages. Oxford. $8.

Art is often the artist’s escape. Such was the case of Charlotte Bronte, the most prolific of the Brontë sisters, who flowered briefly in England during the 1840s with strange, powerful novels and poetry. Charlotte was shy and ugly, proud and ambitious. Her three novels, Jane Eyre, Shirley and Villette, are all switches on the old Cinderella theme: the rejected girl is not only poor but plain; her Byronic hero must see not only through the rags but also through the flesh itself to her spiritual beauty.

That Charlotte tried to escape in her writing is well documented in this painstaking biography. British Scholar Winifred Gerin has already written biographies of Anne Brontë and ne’er-do-well brother Branwell. A decade ago, she moved to the Brontës’ native vil lage of Haworth, the better to hear the moaning of the Yorkshire moors that the girls loved. She has read 20 years’ worth of Blackwood’s magazine to trace the sources of Charlotte’s erudition and deciphered trunkfuls of childish scrawl to interpret her juvenilia. If the result is not the vivid portrait that Victorian Novelist Elizabeth Gaskell wrote right after Charlotte’s death, it is more complete and accurate—an exhaustive source of Brontëana.

Early Shocks. The parsonage at Haworth has become a legend, a crucible of creativity in which the children imagined fantastic kingdoms peopled with fabulous heroes. It also produced recurring tragedy. Mother died of cancer when Charlotte was five. Three years later, her two older sisters died of consumption at an abominable boarding school, where they had been half starved. At Charlotte’s own boarding school, one classmate sized her up as “a little old woman in very old-fashioned clothes.” Unfortunately, the classmate said as much to Charlotte, who ever after suffered self-conscious torments over her ugliness, particularly her stunted height.

The next years were filled with reverses. She took a job as a governess in Yorkshire to supplement the meager family income, was crushed to find herself treated as a common servant. Hoping to start her own school, she enrolled in a Brussels pensionnat to perfect her French and learn feminine “accomplishments”; instead, she broke her heart over the school’s happily married director.

Back at Haworth, still another shock awaited. Brother Branwell, whom she envisaged as a writer of genius, was hopelessly addicted to drugs and alcohol. But Emily and Anne were busily writing poems and novels. Charlotte not only joined them but also took over as their agent; within two years, she had engineered the publication of a joint collection of poems and three novels: Wuthering Heights, by Ellis Bell (Emily), Agnes Grey, by Acton Bell (Anne) and Jane Eyre, by Currer Bell (Charlotte). The poems and the first two novels flopped; Jane Eyre was an immediate bestseller.

Later Balm. Reviewers were ecstatic.

“Here is a voice speaking to the experience of thousands,” wrote one. Said another: “Reality—deep, significant reality—is the characteristic of this book.” Nothing that deeply touched Charlotte —the terrible boarding school where her sisters died, her woes as a governess, the tests of love—is absent from Jane Eyre. If Charlotte’s flaw was excessive romanticism, her strength was the ardor with which she recorded her bitter experiences.

Still, her own age overpraised Charlotte. The real genius turned out to be the reclusive Emily who poured a primitive spirit into Wuthering Heights and wrote a handful of lyrics that rival Blake’s. Yet Charlotte’s success was balm in her tragic years. In 1848, she buried Branwell; soon after, both Emily and Anne died of consumption. Charlotte fell in love with Arthur Bell Nicholls, the Haworth curate. Her father begged her not to marry because he feared she was too small and frail to sur vive pregnancy. He was right. After a few months of marriage in which she was amazed at her own happiness, Charlotte died of tuberculosis and complications of pregnancy. She was 39. The curse on the Brontes was more implacable than any Charlotte’s imagination could devise.