Woman of substance

Charlotte Brontë: A Life. By Claire Harman. Viking; 446 pages; £25. To be published in America by Knopf in March 2016, $30.

“MISS AUSTEN and Thackeray have admirers; Charlotte Brontë has worshippers.” So it seemed to one critic half a century after her death. But it was less the novels than the life itself that stirred the public imagination. The lonely genius of the Yorkshire moors and her doomed sisters, Emily and Anne, touched a romantic nerve. So much so that Henry James was driven to complain that the Brontë legend had “fairly elbowed out” “Jane Eyre” and “Wuthering Heights”. A photograph in Claire Harman’s excellent new bicentennial biography, of a crowd jostling towards the Brontë parsonage when it first opened to the public in 1928, seems to bear him out.

Ms Brontë would have despaired. Not that she was a shrinking violet. Aged 20, she sent a poem to Robert Southey, the British poet laureate, with a letter declaring her desire “to be forever known”. But it was as an author that she wanted fame, and even then she clung to anonymity—hence her pseudonym, Currer Bell: “What author would be without the advantage of being able to walk invisible?” she wrote. Of course, “advantage” meant more than just privacy. It was protection from the double standard. Speaking for her sisters too, she realised that their “mode of writing and thinking was not what is called ‘feminine’”. She was right. When “Jane Eyre” came out in 1847, one critic found the novel praiseworthy if written by a man, but “odious” from a woman.

No wonder, then, that Ms Harman’s Charlotte Brontë is angry. Anger explodes from her early journals and anger, she says, is the predominant emotion of “Jane Eyre”, the penniless orphan who is hired as governess to the ward of the mysterious Mr Rochester. Charlotte and Jane represented a new kind of woman. “Women are supposed to be very calm,” says her heroine; but neither she nor her author could keep quiet. Utterance was a necessity: “something spoke out of me”, says Jane, “over which I had no control”.

Ms Harman tells a story about a “bog burst”, a methane explosion on the moors when Ms Brontë was eight. The sense of a verbal substratum burning under the “feminine” crust runs through this biography, as it did through Lyndall Gordon’s brilliant study, “Charlotte Brontë: A Passionate Life” (1994). Ms Harman is less inward than Ms Gordon, but she brings to the theme an eloquence of her own—most movingly when Ms Brontë finds a language for the man she loved, Constantin Heger, the married French literature master at the Brussels school where she taught: “the union she craved with Heger was one of souls; a possession, a haunting, a living-through, a sharing of ideas, intensely verbal, profoundly silent...”

Ms Harman writes with warmth and a fine understanding of Ms Brontë’s literary significance. Above all, she is a storyteller, with a sense of pace and timing, relish for a good scene and a wry sense of humour. Here is the writer, but also the woman people knew—thick spectacles, bad teeth, slipping hairpiece and all.