Books: WOMEN OF LETTERS

THE BRONTES: A Life in Letters by Juliet Barker, Viking pounds

Juliet Barker is one of the best living interpreters and recorders of the Bronte family. She has a profound understanding of their milieu and terrain. To her gifts of absorptive intelligence and unobtrusive style she is able to add dedication and the scholarly stamina that comes only when there is passion for a subject.

We live in a time when there is, often for the best reasons, much sound made about openness, contact and emotional frankness. The Bronte family constitutes an impressive argument for the creative fertility of repression and isolation. Of course this is too easy, just as it would be slack to conclude that the death of their mother when Maria, the eldest, was only seven, Elizabeth six, Charlotte five, Branwell four, Emily three and Anne, the baby, not yet two, was in itself a spur to the children's astounding ingrown interdependence. From these letters it emerges clearly, as though it were not clear from their work whose defining mutual condition is perhaps intensity, that the Bronte family - those who survived, at least, beyond childhood - was capable of the fiercest access to its own emotions.

And these emotions are unrelenting. Nothing needs working up. The family lived right up against the bones of life. At the front of this carefully shaped anthology, Juliet Barker appends the Admissions Register of the Clergy Daughters' School, Cowan Bridge. Hard facts as perceived by teachers, unmediated by literary historical piety are shocking enough. Charlotte Bronte's "acquirements on entering" are recorded: "Reads tolerably - Writes indifferently - Ciphers a little and works neatly. Knows nothing of Grammar, Geography, History or Accomplishments." Emily: "Reads very prettily, and Works a little." Similarly grudging accounts are given of the two older sisters' accomplishments. In the column called "General Remarks", there is a scanty account of each of the two oldest little girls' death. Of Maria, her father, the Reverend Patrick Bronte, said, "She exhibited during her illness many symptoms of a heart under divine influence."

Like her younger sisters, Maria Bronte was educated with a view to her becoming a governess. This employment was not so much a calling as a terminus. The letters from Charlotte about the condition of governesshood mark out her gift for describing the state of not-belonging (Jane Eyre and Villette are masterpieces of solution to this state). Charlotte's first situation was at a place named, with Murdstonian aptitude, Stonegappe. She seems as a rule to have preferred her employers to their wives, for whom eventually she devised so striking a literary fate.

"I have striven hard to be pleased with my new situation. The country, the house, and the grounds are, as I have said, divine. But alack-a-day! there is such a thing as seeing all beautiful around you ... and not having a free moment or free thought left to enjoy them ... I used to think I should like to be in the stir of grand folks' society but I have had enough of it - it is dreary work to look on and listen. I see now more clearly than I have ever done before that a private governess has no existence, is not considered as a living and rational being except as connected with the wearisome duties she has to fulfil."

At home in the parsonage at Haworth, the Bronte sisters shared their domestic tasks with relish and energy, recounted in the charming intertwined diary papers of the very young Emily and Anne, who were cleaved personalities. Tabby is the Bronte servant, who worked for the family for 30 years.

"It is past twelve o'clock. Anne and I have not tid[i]ed ourselv[e]s, done our bed work or done our lessons and we want to go out to play. We are going to have for Dinner Boiled Beef Turnips, potato's and applepudding the Kitchin is in a very untidy state Anne and I have not done our music exercise which consists of b majer Taby said on my putting a pen in her face Ya pitter pottering there instead of pilling a potate I answered O Dear, O Dear, O Dear I will derictly...

"Anne and I say I wonder what we shall be like and what we shall be and where we shall be if all goes on well in the year 1874 - in which year I shall be in my 57th year Anne will be going in her 55th year Branwell will be going in his 58th year And Charlotte in her 59th year hoping we shall all be well at that time we close our paper

"Emily, and Anne November the 24 1834."

The fluctuation of style between the infantile articulation of the everyday and the grand plain articulation of the profound is one of the vivid delights these letters offer. It is painful and exciting to read the letters of a family, or of a close circle. The reader feels, along with the shifts of loyalty and partisanship (there are some shockers here from Branwell, sucking up to Hartley Coleridge among others), the momentum towards a known conclusion that, paradoxically, in fiction and in unmediated life, adds to rather than subtracts from the intimate engagement we feel with a story.

In collecting these letters from the family, Juliet Barker conveys the closeness of their bond, their horror of separation. They felt separation as a breakage. She includes letters from people outside the family, where they are of interest - for example from Charlotte's great friend Ellen Nussey, whose brother Henry offered her his hand, and from the Poet Laureate Robert Southey, who intuited her sense of imprisonment, her fire, and her consumption by daydreams, and, although asserting that, "Literature cannot be the business of a woman's life and it ought not to be," showed early appreciation and encouragement of the best and less fevered in her talent.

Aside from their invented realms and histories, the Brontes fed on letters, church-visiting, and intermittent visitors, including Mr Bronte's curates, who occasionally, as in the case of William Weightman, shortly to be known - for his prettiness as well as for reasons of coyness - as "Celia Amelia", caused fluctuations in mood at the Parsonage. A propos des bottes, when at the height of her interest in him, Charlotte wrote to Ellen Nussey:

"Do not be over-persuaded to marry a man you can never respect - I do not say love, because I think, if you can respect a person before marriage, moderate love at least will come after; and as to intense passion, I am convinced that it is no desirable feeling. In the first place, it seldom or never meets with a requital; and, in the second place, if it did, the feeling would be only temporary: it would last the honeymoon, and then perhaps, give way to disgust, or indifference, worse, perhaps, than disgust. Certainly this would be the case on the man's part; and on the woman's God help her, if she is left to love passionately and alone."

The elegance and trenchancy of Charlotte's writing, her ease with sarcasm, lie alongside her own capacity for passion. Perhaps the most poignant illustration in this appealingly illustrated book - how accomplished the family were at drawing what they saw - is a letter she wrote to M. Heger, the "Professor" of Villette, telling how she was wretched without him. He tore it up and threw it away. His wife found it and stitched it back together. The stitching is not neat.

The sisters formed a plan of setting up a school together. It fell to nothing. Charlotte and Emily went to Brussels, where Emily favoured the teaching methods of M.Heger less than did Charlotte. Anne, meanwhile, was working as a governess and Branwell, until he was dismissed over a matter of eleven unaccounted-for pounds, for the railways. Curate Weightman and Aunt Branwell died. A new curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls, arrived in May 1845. In the autumn of that year, Charlotte "accidentally lighted on a MS volume of verse in my sister Emily's handwriting ... Of course I was not surprised, knowing that she could and did write verse: I looked it over, and something more than surprise seized me, - a deep conviction that these were not common effusions, nor at all like the poetry women generally write. I thought them condensed and terse, vigorous and genuine. To my ear, they had also a peculiar music - wild, melancholy, and elevating.

"Meantime, my younger sister quietly produced some of her own compositions, intimating that since Emily's had given me pleasure, I might like to look at hers. I could not but be a partial judge, yet I thought that these verses too had a sweet sincere pathos of their own."

So begins the period of creative blazing, and carefully contrived genderless anonymity for Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. Charlotte took the lead in dealing with the publishers. Her intellectual confidence came into its own. She wrote to the publisher's reader William Smith Williams, after the sensational publication of Jane Eyre:

"I was glad and proud to get the Bank Bill Mr Smith sent me yesterday - but I hardly ever felt delight equal to that which cheered me when I received your letter containing an extract from a note by Mr Thackeray in which he expressed himself gratified with the perusal of Jane Eyre. Mr Thackeray is a keen, ruthless satirist - I had never perused his writings but with blended feelings of admiration and indignation - Critics ... do not know what an intellectual boa-constrictor he is - they call him 'humerous', brilliant - his is almost scalping humour, a most deadly brilliancy - he does not play with his prey - he coils round it and crushes it in his rings."

Charlotte began to correspond with G H Lewes (whose review of Shirley in The Edinburgh Review she "scalped") and with Mrs Gaskell, but she wrote constantly to Ellen Nussey. She met Miss Martineau and Thackeray himself, but was excruciated by shyness. She told Ellen of the visits to London and of her "other life", as Juliet Barker rightly calls it, "as an authoress". It is intriguing to note that Charlotte Bronte was aware of herself as a woman in these gatherings of distinguished men, and of how she, for all her declarations of sparrowhood, was threatening to other women who had achieved less.

Meanwhile, Branwell was declining into sottish inebriety, artistically unfulfilled and unable to find a job. Mr Bronte proposed marriage to the orphaned Maria Branwell, a cousin of some neighbours, whose delightfully thawing letters are included here. Branwell died. First Anne, then Emily, sank to death, recounted by their increasingly lonely, increasingly lauded sister, in the plainest of words in each case. Charlotte thought about the past and reflected upon death:

"The longer we have watched the gradual attentuation [sic] of the thread of life, the more its final severance seems to take us by surprise. And then, too, most truly do you describe the oblivion of faults which succeeds to Death. No sooner ... is the pulse stilled than we forget what anxiety, what anguish, what shame the frailties and vices of that poor unconscious mould of clay once caused us; yearning love and bitter pity are the only sentiments the heart admits, but with these, for a time, it is sorely oppressed. "

She came almost to live for letters. To the publisher George Smith she wrote speaking letters of great suppressed intimacy. She commenced, rather reluctantly, a hidden correspondence with the curate Arthur Bell Nicholls, whom at length she married, and who asked Ellen Nussey to destroy his wife's letters. On 30 March 1855 Charlotte Bronte died, aged not quite 39. She was killed by hyperemesis gravidarum, excessive vomiting occasioned by pregnancy.

Juliet Barker leaves to the father of these burning children the last words, written to George Smith:

"We mourn the loss of one, whose like, we hope not, ever to see again - and as you justly state we do not mourn alone - That you may never experimentally know, sorrow such as ours, and that when trouble does come, you may receive due aid from heaven, is the sincere wish and ardent prayer, of

Yours, very respectfully and truly, P Bronte."