The Brontes A Brief Introduction Of all Victorian literary

names none has so proved its power to excite curiosity, stir romantic and dramatic imaginations, evoke chatter and personal discussion, as has the name of Bronte. The family story literally told makes a novel in itself; indeed it furnished the matter of the novels which the family produced.

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• Patrick Prunty, which name he himself glorified as “Bronte,” came out of North Ireland, studied at Cambridge, and was led by his clerical fate to serve in the harsh moorlands of Yorkshire.

• He was spirited, high-tempered, tender-hearted, and rather fourth-rate in his literary performance. At thirty-five he married a gentle Miss Branwell from the South.

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• They have six children— Maria, Elizabeth, Charlotte, Branwell, Emily, and Anne. They were all exceptional; four at least were highly talented, and two of them, Charlotte and Emily, were geniuses.

• The Bronte children, especially Emily, loved and consorted with the moors, until the wild spirit of the place, at once alluring and inscrutable, became a part of their nature and their art.

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Even as children, the girls had suffered in cheerless boarding-schools; as young women Anne and Charlotte endured even more as governesses of young barbarians.

Emily, mystic, stoical, and self-contained but not enterprising, roamed the moors and poured out her flaming soul in secret song, whose music is the very sound of the strong upland winds.

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• Charlotte, small, energetic, brave, was the captain of this little band. Though she and Anne hated teaching, at twenty-six she conceived the scheme of starting a school.

• To equip herself with French and other languages, she spent a year and a half in Brussels, in the school of Paul Heger and his wife — part of the time teaching.

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• With Paul, small, dark, irascible, but winning, and always kind to her, she fell in love; and crushing this secret and hopeless agony down in her heart, she came home to launch the new venture. Not a pupil appeared.

• She then discovered Emily's poems, and with her own and Anne's made up the famous little still-born volume, now a prize of collectors, Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell.

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• Charlotte was now used to defeat, but not to accepting defeat. Bravely she and her sisters set to work on novels, she on The Professor, Anne on Agnes Grey, and Emily on Wuthering Heights.

• This was no longer the tale-spinning of their youth, but serious business. For more than a year the novels wandered about in disguise of male authorship from one indifferent publisher to another.

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Meanwhile, Charlotte left her drunken brother at home, to take her father to Manchester for the removal of cataracts, and momentously beguiled the hours of watching by beginning Jane Eyre. A year later it found an instant publisher, and instant and overwhelming success.

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This is not to be explained by the bare plot, which, though it ferments with a bit of sensation and what to the Victorian taste was scandal, is full of impossibilities.

Yet its essential reality has made it a great classic. For the Bronte novels are a compound of the wild imaginations of the Bronte girlhood and the hard and bitter circumstance and disillusion of their lives.

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• Jane Eyre and all the rest are fine mosaics of a thousand actual incidents, places, persons they knew, and Bronte devotees never tire of tracing and identifying them.

• Jane herself is Charlotte, little, long-suffering, shy, repressed, a smouldering volcano of passion beneath. Rochester is the tortured and pitiful soul living only in her imagination, to whom she longed to devote herself.

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Indeed all her work is intense with the pressure of strong feeling beneath the surface, which clothes it in a kind of fascinating mystery — not the theatrical mystery of Byron, nor the mystery of suspense, though there is a touch of both — but the mystery at bottom of the reticent, thwarted, disillusioned, brave woman who tells the tales.

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Even after Jane Eyre the sisters had to share the expense of publishing Wuthering Heights, and recognition of its worth came slowly.

The reader cannot accept its unrelieved career of madness and misery as a copy of real life. Rather it is like a musical or poetic transcription of the strange inscrutable spirit of Emily herself.

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The untamed, disordered, overwhelming powers of the moor become incarnate, and merge themselves indistinguishably with human life.

The dark expanse is lightened at moments with the tender and unearthly light of a love affair almost heroic in depth and grandeur.

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She had idolized Thackeray, but, after her habit, was inclined to disillusionment when she met him.

With Charlotte's fame began her visits to London, and acquaintance with the literary great.

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The story of the grand dinner of celebrities he gave in her honor, and its collapse into such dullness that even the host deserted, is too well-known to repeat. She was too shy and too critical to be made a lion.

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• In the meantime she had begun Shirley, a story involved with the riots of labor against machinery, and portraying Emily in the title-role.

• Composition dragged on through what must have been the culminating trouble of her life, for in the eight months between September, 1848, and May, 1849, she lost her brother and both gifted sisters.

• Shirley was followed in three years by Villette (1853), containing matter from her earlier story, The Professor.

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She received several offers of marriage from clerics which she refused, probably because of her strange feminine irony. Oddly enough the one to win her heart when she was thirty-eight, was her father's curate, Arthur Nicholls. He was a fine and gentle soul, but with a touch of Rochester's passion in his wooing.

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After all the bitter and thwarted years, it seemed at last as if her suppressed dream had come true, and her pent-up feelings were to find happy release. Over her last letters falls a new and sober sweetness alien to her earlier writings. Nine months after her marriage her new life sank quite suddenly to its close.

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