‘Charlotte Brontë: A Life’, by Claire Harman

In among the usual assortment of grainy daguerreotypes and sepia-tinted cartes-de-visite illustrating Claire Harman’s Charlotte Brontë: A Life is a curiously cheerful photograph of the crowds gathered for the opening of the Brontë Museum at Haworth Parsonage in 1928. They are a visibly surging sea of cloches, flat caps and homburg hats, hundreds of bobbing heads stretching as far back as the lens can reach. Two impish boys and a pair of modishly dressed women seem to have clambered on to the ledge of the adjoining school, angling for a better view. In some way the photograph captures the challenge the Brontës pose to even the most intrepid biographer: how to square the enduring fascination their work elicits with the quiet lives they seemed to have led, so brief, muted and unvarying.

Charlotte, though, emerges here as a complicated figure, reticent yet capable of devoted friendships, embedded in a nexus of correspondence, confiding and concealing by turns. If nothing wildly revelatory comes to light in this new account, it is, nonetheless, full of pleasing and piquant detail, scraps of passing recollection assembled from the various lives and letters in which the Brontës featured and from which we might reconstruct their world: details like that of Tabby the cook, affectionately mocked by Emily for her characteristic “O Dear, O Dear, O Dear” and remembered by Charlotte for boiling potatoes into “a sort of vegetable glue”.

The girls’ peculiar diet seemed indicative to outsiders of their more generally peculiar ways. A neighbour recalled them as children, stood awkwardly at a village party, perplexed by play. Charlotte’s classmates at Roe Head School remembered her as similarly maladroit at ball games, but gifted at conjuring stories about a female ghost rumoured to roam the attic above the dormitory. Harman, an experienced biographer, treads gingerly here, pointing up influences and prodding at delicious coincidences, careful not to overstep. She nods at a blunderingly bad novel composed by Patrick Brontë (and likely well-thumbed by his daughters) about a virtuous girl who fends off a rake and comes into a sudden bequest. Emily too, Harman points out, might have taken note of an unholy neighbourhood row between one Jack Sharp, adopted son of Walterclough Hall, and the disgruntled cousin who ousted him. Sharp set up a rival home in malevolently close proximity, high on the tempestuous moors.

There are more provocative speculations that Harman evaluates evenly but struggles to establish beyond weakly suggestive hearsay. Elizabeth Gaskell, as early as 1857 in her Life of Charlotte Brontë, had tentatively enquired about opium use (a question artfully blocked by Charlotte) but Harman can hardly do much more than reach for evidence from Lucy Snowe’s gorgeously drugged vision of the streets of Brussels in Villette (1853). More persuasive is the reading of clinical depression in Charlotte’s letters, a series of mental breakdowns alluded to in hushed, anguished intimations. She writes to life-long friend Ellen Nussey sentences so freighted with unutterable emotion that they falter and break apart: “I keep trying to do right, checking wrong feelings, repressing wrong thoughts . . . but still — every instant I find — myself going astray . . . I abhor myself — I despise myself . . . ”

Harman reads this candidly as an expression of frustration, sexual as well as emotional, and the gambit of this biography is the weight it allots to Charlotte’s apparently unrequited passion for Constantin Héger, “Master” of the school in Brussels at which she studied and taught between 1842 and 1844. The life, as Harman tells it, is bookended by imagined vignettes involving Héger, whose seemingly casual flirtation and passing attention could well have been inflated by the romantically inexperienced Charlotte. Certainly, there is something unkind, brutal even, in the fate of a pleading note sent by Charlotte to Héger in 1845. Evidently unmoved, Héger had absent-mindedly jotted on it the address of a local cobbler.

Evidently unmoved by Charlotte’s pleading note, Héger had jotted on it the address of a local cobbler

This “difficult, mercurial character” provides the prototype for Jane Eyre’s Rochester and all the rest, Harman hypothesises hopefully. Well, perhaps. But so much more compelling than the Héger affair are the smaller details, the quirks and curios of the sisters and their short lives together, the almost entirely enclosed world in which each of them wrote, their wild, secretive imaginings and fugitive ambitions only gradually becoming apparent to each other. How strange those subdued sonnets written by Anne following the death of a local clergyman; how altogether odd Emily’s fervent interest in railway stocks, her devotion to animals and a jaw-dropping story in which she self-cauterised a dog bite with one of Tabby’s irons.

When an ardent 19-year-old called Frederick Enoch wrote to the sisters in 1846 requesting autographs, they sent him a scrap of paper with those awkward, boxy pseudonyms — Currer Bell, Ellis Bell, Acton Bell — neatly inscribed, each in a distinctive hand but pressed close together. After Anne’s death, blind with grief, Charlotte wrote brokenly “one by one I have watched them fall asleep on my arm — and closed their glazed eyes . . . — and — thus far — God has upheld me.” The piety is bitterly won, but beneath it, one suspects, was the truest passion of her brief life.

Charlotte Brontë: A Life, by Claire Harman, Viking RRP£25, 480 pages

Shahidha Bari is lecturer in Romanticism at Queen Mary University of London