The women novelists

The genius of Charlotte Brontë presents several characteristics which do not belong to the more or less orderly development of the earlier women’s work. In the first place she is primarily a romancist, depending far more on emotional analysis than on the exact portraiture of everyday life. Though her materials, like theirs, are gained entirely from personal experience, she clothes them with a passionate imagination very foreign to anything in Miss Burney or Jane Austen. She writes, in other words, because her emotions are forced into speech by that very intensity; not at all from amused observation of life. It would be difficult, indeed, to find outside her few remarkable stories so powerful an expression of passion as felt by women—who do not, as a rule, admit the power of such stormy emotions. Her work is further remarkable for being mainly inspired by memory; while the recognition of responsiveness in women leads her to paint mutual passion as it has been seldom revealed elsewhere.

Much has been written of late years concerning the life of Charlotte Brontë, and we have been told that the mystery is solved at last. For despite the almost startling frankness of Mrs. Gaskell’s famous Life; despite the intimate character of many of her published letters; it has always been recognised that the Charlotte Brontë of the biographers was not the Charlotte Brontë of Jane Eyre and Villette. Now that we have the letters to Monsieur Heger, however, it seems to be a prevailing conclusion that reconciliation, and understanding, are possible. If Charlotte Brontë, like her own Lucy Snowe, was in love with “her master”; if he was perfectly happy in his married life and, however responsive to enthusiastic admiration, found warmer feelings both embarrassing and vexatious; we have discovered the tragedy which fired her imagination, the utter loneliness which taught her to dwell so bitterly on the aching void of unreturned affection, to idealise so romantically the rapture of marriage. Personally we are disposed to accept these interpretations, but not to rely on them for everything. To begin with, it is always dangerous to dwell upon any “explanation” of genius; and, in the second place, it was not Charlotte Brontë’s experiences (which others have suffered), but the nature awakened by them, which determined their artistic expression.

Part of the difficulty arises from the two almost contradictory methods in which she “worked up” her stories. She had remarkable powers of observation and borrowed from real life as recklessly as Shakespeare borrowed plots, with very similar indifference to possible criticism. In this matter, indeed, she cannot be altogether acquitted of malice or spite; and we do not learn with unmixed pleasure how many “originals” actually existed for her dramatis personæ.

But, on the other hand, if “every person and a large proportion of the incidents were copied from life,” the emotional power of her work is entirely imaginative. As pictures of life, her stories are inadequate and unsatisfying, partly because there is so much in human nature and in life which does not interest her: so much of which she knew nothing; and she is only at home in the heart of her subject. Here again she is in no way realistic—as was Jane Austen in manners or George Eliot in emotion—but entirely romantic, however original her conception of romance. Her heroes and heroines are as far from everyday humanity, and as ideal and visionary, as Mrs. Radcliffe’s, though she does not, of course, follow the “rules” of romance: rather creating out of her own brain a new heaven and a new earth, inhabited by a people that know not God or man.

Apart from the rude awakening at Brussels, again, she exhibited in private correspondence by turns the strange contrasts between common sense and emotionalism which mark her work.

She defines the “right path” as “that which necessitates the greatest sacrifice of self-interest”: she thinks, “if you can respect a person before marriage, moderate love at least will come after; and as to intense passion, I am convinced that that is no desirable feeling.”

She advises her best friend that

On the other hand, “if you knew my thoughts, the dreams that absorb me, and the fiery imagination that at times eats me up, and makes me feel society, as it is, insipid, you would pity me and I daresay despise me.”

Her emotion on first seeing the sea is absolutely overpowering; and surely we know the woman who insisted on visiting a maidservant “attacked by a violent fever,” fearlessly entered her room in spite of every remonstrance, “threw herself on the bed beside her, and repeatedly kissed her burning brow.”

Experience with her, in fact, had never been confined to the external happenings, which can be accumulated, with more or less sympathy, by the biographer; and her own declaration of how she worked up episodes outside her own experience may be applied, without much modification, to her manipulation of that experience itself. Asked whether the description of taking opium in Villette was based on knowledge,

It is obvious that, if no less feminine than her predecessors, the nature and methods of Charlotte Brontë would produce very different work from theirs. In narrative and description she remains domestic and middle-class. She does not adopt the “high” notions of aristocracy, she does not plunge into the mysteries of crime. Her plots are laid “at home,” so to speak, and among the professional classes or small gentry with whom she was personally familiar. The only material which may be noticed as a new departure is derived from her particular experiences in schools in England and abroad, combined with her intimate knowledge of the governess and the tutor. In Shirley, again, she is one of the earliest women to devote any serious attention to the progress of trade and the introduction of machinery, with its effect on the social problems of the working classes.

In construction, on the other hand, she is admittedly inferior to her predecessors, since her plots are melodramatic, and her characterisation is disturbed by a somewhat morbid analysis of unusual passion. Her feminine ideal has no parallel in the “sensibility” of Fanny Burney or the sprightly “calm” of Jane Austen. Its most distinguishing characteristic is, naturally, revealed in the attitude assumed towards man. The hero, the ideal lover, is always “the Master” of the heroine. Jane Eyre being a governess and Lucy Snowe a pupil, we might perhaps miss the full significance of the phrase; but even the strong-minded Shirley refuses Sir Philip Nunnely, because, among other reasons, “he is very amiable—very excellent—truly estimable, but not my master; not in one point. I could not trust myself with his happiness: I would not undertake the keeping of it for thousands; I will accept no hand that cannot hold me in check.”

Jane Austen once playfully accused herself of having dared to draw a heroine who had fallen in love without first having ascertained the gentleman’s feeling. This is the normal achievement—in Charlotte Brontë—not only of heroines, but of all women. It is, of course, almost inevitable that since, in her work (as in those of her sister-authors) we see everything through the minds of the women characters, we should learn the state of their heart first; but, in most cases at least, it is certain that we are in as much doubt as the heroine herself concerning the man’s feelings, and it is fairly obvious that often he has actually not made up his mind. The women in Charlotte Brontë, in fact, are what we now call “doormats.” They delight in serving the Beloved; they expect him to be a superior being, with more control over his emotions; less dependent on emotion or even on domestic comfort, appropriately concerned with matters not suited to feminine intellects, and accustomed to “keep his own counsel” about the important decisions of life.

It is her achievement to have secured our enthusiastic devotion to “females” so thoroughly Early Victorian; for the heroines of Charlotte Brontë remain some of the most striking figures in fiction. They are really heroic, and, while glorying in their self-imposed limitations, become vital by their intensity and depth. Jane Austen once quietly demonstrated the natural “constancy” of women; Charlotte Brontë paints this virtue in fiery colours across all her work. Her incidental, but most marked, preference for plain heroines—inspired, apparently, by passionate jealousy of popular beauty—serves to emphasise the abnormal capacity for passion and fidelity which, in her judgment, the power of easily exciting general admiration apparently tends to diminish.

A contemporary reviewer in the Quarterly—probably Lockhart—found this type of women disgustingly sly. The whole of Jane Eyre, indeed, fills him with holy horror, which is genuine enough, though expressed with most ungentlemanly virulence, and prefaced with the extraordinary suggestion that “Jane Eyre is merely another Pamela (!) ... a small, plain, odd creature, who has been brought up dry upon school learning, and somewhat stunted accordingly in mind and body, and who is thrown upon the world as ignorant of its ways, and as destitute of its friendships, as a shipwrecked mariner upon a strange coast.” Rochester, on the other hand, he finds “captious and Turklike ... a strange brute, somewhat in the Squire Western style of absolute and capricious eccentricity.” The book is guilty of the “highest moral offence a novel-writer can commit, that of making an unworthy character interesting in the eyes of the reader. Mr. Rochester is a man who deliberately and secretly seeks to violate the laws both of God and man, and yet we will be bound half our lady writers are enchanted with him for a model of generosity and honour.”

We cannot, to-day, detect the “pedantry, stupidity, or gross vulgarity” of the novel; nor do we distinguish so sharply between the sly governess—“this housemaid beau ideal of the arts of coquetry”—determined to catch Rochester, and the “noble, high-souled woman” who rejects his dishonourable proposals. The fact seems to be that masculine critics of those days regarded the expression of emotion as indelicate in woman. Was it this criticism, or merely her knowledge of men, that inspired that bitter passage in Shirley:

Men could not conceive that any lady who was conscious of love had “really nice feelings” about it. Moreover, Jane Eyre is “a mere heathen ... no Christian grace is perceptible upon her.” She upheld women’s rights, which is “ungrateful” to God. “There is throughout a murmuring against the comforts of the rich and against the privations of the poor, which, as far as each individual is concerned, is a murmuring against God’s appointment.” Wherefore the “plain, odd woman, destitute of all the conventional features of feminine attraction,” is not made interesting, but remains “a being totally uncongenial to our feelings from beginning to end ... a decidedly vulgar-minded woman—one whom we should not care for as an acquaintance, whom we should not seek as a friend, whom we should not desire for a relation, and whom we should most scrupulously avoid for a governess.”

This outspoken, and unsympathetic, criticism is yet eminently instructive. It shows us all that Charlotte Brontë accomplished for the first time; and reveals the full force of prejudice against which she was, more or less consciously, in revolt.

It remains only to note that in the matter of style her critics at once recognised her power. “It is impossible not to be spellbound with the freedom of the touch. It would be mere hackneyed courtesy to call it ‘fine writing.’ It bears no impress of being written at all, but is poured out rather in the heat and flurry of an instinct which flows ungovernably on to its object, indifferent by what means it reaches it, and unconscious too.”

Passing to modern criticism, we find one writer declaring that Rochester’s character “belongs to the realm of the railway bookstall shilling novel,” while to another it seems “of all her creations the most wonderful ... from her own inmost nobility of temper and depth of suffering she moulded a man, reversing the marvels of God’s creation.”

It is not, I think, necessary to be dogmatic in comparing the “greatness” of Villette and Jane Eyre. The former is “more elaborated, more mature in execution, but less tragic, less simple and direct.” The influence of personal tragedy (assuming her love for Monsieur Heger) obviously permeates the work; leading to the idealisation of the pedagogue genius (revived in Louis Gerard Moore, Esq.—himself half Flemish), and to unjust hostility against the Continental feminine (partially atoned for in Hortense Moore). On the other hand, it is more in touch with real life; less melodramatic, though still sensational; more acutely varied, and equally vivid, in characterisation.

Finally, in Shirley, if the spirit of Charlotte Brontë is less concentrated, it burns with no less steady flame. Here, for almost the first time in a woman-writer, we find that eager questioning upon the earlier struggles between capital and labour—the risks attendant upon the introduction of machinery, the proper relations between master and men—which afterwards became part of the stock material for fiction. We find, too, much shrewd comment upon her own experience of clerical types—no less in the contrast between Helstone and Hall than in the somewhat heavily satirised curates; and some, probably inherited, injustice towards Dissenters. The characterisation is far more varied and more realistic; since we have at least two pairs of lovers, the numerous Yorke family, and a whole host of “walking ladies and gentlemen,” more or less carefully portrayed. Local colour appears in several passages of enthusiastic analysis of Yorkshire manners; and the philosophy is frequently turned on everyday life. For example:

Yet the inspiration of Shirley echoes Jane Eyre and Villette. Here, too, as we have seen,—though the heroine is a rich beauty,—Man should be Master; and “indisputably, a great, good, handsome man is the first of created things.” Yet neither Shirley nor her friend Caroline have anything in common with the “average” woman, who, “if her admirers only told her that she was an angel, would let them treat her like an idiot”; or with her parents, who “would have delivered her over to the Rector’s loving-kindness and his tender mercies without one scruple”; or with the second Mrs. Helstone, who “reversing the natural order of insect existence, would have fluttered through the honeymoon, a bright, admired butterfly, and crawled the rest of her days a sordid, trampled worm.”

Jane Eyre, 1847.
Shirley, 1849.
Villette, 1852.
The Professor, 1857.