Tortuous love life of 'fantasy world' Charlotte
Her vivid imagination made her one of England's greatest novelists. But it was also her downfall.
Charlotte Bronte lived in fantasy land most of her life. And it did her no favours.
A new book on the iconic Yorkshire writer, unveiled during a public reading this week at Sheffield's Off The Shelf festival, portrays the most famous of the Bronte sisters in a very different light to that of pioneering literary heroine and a woman who urged others to settle for nothing less than true love.
"Charlotte Bront was many things. An extraordinary literary talent and a woman whose vivid imagination and sheer determination allowed her to defy Victorian convention. Yet there were many times during my research when I felt desperately sorry for her," says Yorkshire journalist Sarah Freeman, who lifts the lid on the real Charlotte in her book Bronte In Love.
The truth, she says, is that the creator of Jane Eyre, a writer who seemed to have such insight into human emotions, had a deeply flawed relationship with love.
She spent so long imagining what true love would be like, she got carried away with her romantic daydream and fell headlong into a passionate obsession with a married man who had no such feelings for her, wasting years of her life pining for a man she could never have.
The secrets of Charlotte's unhappy love life were never told, despite the fact that she became, just after her death, one of the earliest subjects of the phenomenon that now is the celebrity biography.
The Life of Charlotte Bront was written after her death in 1855 by Elizabeth Gaskell, the friend and fellow author had been determined to tell the world what a gifted writer it had lost.
It was the first full-length biography of a female novelist and proclaimed Charlotte to be a genius. That much is undisputed by Yorkshire Post features editor Sarah. But, she says, the book suppressed details of Charlotte's various love affairs and did its best to play on the sympathy vote, casting her as the repressed daughter of a tyrannical cleric father.
But although delighted to be dispelling the myths that have surrounded Charlotte for over 150 years, Sarah's biography was not born out of an abiding passion for Bronte.
"I had studied Jane Eyre at English Literature A-level and loved it, but I was approached by the publishers to write the book," she says.
For six months Sarah, features editor of the Yorkshire Post in Leeds, read biography after biography and poured through archived letters between Charlotte, her suitors, real and imagined, her family and friends.
The letters included a collection penned during her three-week stay at Norton Lees Hall in Hathersage, the home of her dearest friend Ellen's brother which was to become the setting for Jane Eyre.
""I actually grew more and more interested in her as I learned more about her. Like many people I didn't know much about her love life. She has this image of a spinster character, wandering the Moors alone.
"But that was Emily, they younger sister, a loner and a home-bird.
Charlotte was the total opposite; a sociable person with a fabulous sense of humour and a massive ambition to be a published author when that was not the done thing for a woman.
"She was also a woman who had three proposals of marriage, a torturous, obsessional love and then married a man she didn't love at all. My book is about her loves and how they affected her and her writing."
Charlotte's unsuccessful romantic life eventually became the inspiration for the characters and plot lines of her soaring romantic novels.
Had her experience of love been different, it is probable that Jane Eyre, one of the greatest romantic novels ever written, would never have existed.
"Charlotte's first ever novel, The Professor, is very heavily influenced by her thwarted love for Constantin Heger, the married man she met when she and sister Emily travelled to Brussels to better their language skills," says Sarah.
"When you know the facts, as you read the book you can clearly see its author had just come out of a tortuous relationship."
Charlotte had considered Heger the love of her life, yet, says Sarah, the tutor six years her senior and a father of six did nothing to encourage her.
"He saw her writing talent and encouraged her. She had never had that before and became obsessed with him. She persuaded herself his wife, Madame Claire Zoe, was a cold, evil woman who was controlling Constantin and preventing them from being together.
"She was, I think, a victim of her own imagination. She was desperate to find the type of love she had read about in Byron's torrid tales. So she conjured up a grand passion.
"Her love for someone who didn't love her drove her almost to the brink of a breakdown. And after she returned to England she began furiously writing letters to him. For 18 months, she begged him to write, but got none in reply."
A small number of those letters survive today. Researchers like Sarah can only wonder how many were destroyed – and by whom – when they arrived at the Heger family home in Brussels.
Published after Charlotte's death, by all accounts The Professor wasn't a terribly well-crafted book. Her second novel was drastically better; it was Jane Eyre.
"It was obviously the story of herself and Heger, rewritten with a happy ending," says Sarah. "She allowed fictional passion and romance to right all the wrongs in her life. "Jane's Mr Rochester was clearly based on Heger. And the mad Mrs Rochester in the attic was Charlotte's revenge on Heger's wife."
Through her research, Sarah came to see Charlotte as a split personality; a woman able to flirt coquettishly in her letters, as seen in correspondence with her next object of her affections, her handsome, charming publisher George Smith, yet so burdened with lack of self-esteem she couldn't allow the relationship to flourish anywhere other than on paper.
She sabotaged the relationship with George at a point where many believed he was about to propose, then used the relationship as inspiration for her last novel, Villette.
Sarah ruminates on whether Charlotte, who believed herself plain, thought she simply wasn't good enough for George, or whether the pain of her doomed love for Heger had made her too fearful of having her heart re-broken.
And then there was her burning desire to be a celebrated novelist.
Ironically, once she had made it into print and was invited down to London to be feted by the literary set, she was too painfully shy to cope.
"During one soiree, thrown by fellow novelist Elizabeth Gaskell to introduce Charlotte to high-ranking fans, publishers and literary critics, Charlotte was so terrified at the thought of being the centre of attention, she actually hid behind the curtains," says Sarah.
Despite all her lofty ambitions, the sleepily safe life in Howarth vicarage was, Charlotte realised, where she belonged.
"At 37 she had a huge does of reality; her brother and her sisters had died within nine months of each other; she was facing a future as a spinster, looking after her ageing father. And on June 29, 1854, she walked into her father's church and of her own free will married a man she didn't love."
Her father's curate, Arthur Nicholls, was neither dashing, nor ruggedly handsome. He had proposed some months earlier, but she had turned him down because she thought he merely wanted a wife.
She realised he was deeply in love with her when he broke down in the pulpit while giving a sermon. He saw her in the congregation and could not control his grief," says Sarah.
Nevertheless, she could not bring herself to stop him leaving. And only after months of letter writing did a gentle courtship begin.
"She eventually realised companionship was more important than the idealistic passion she had spent her entire life searching for. She was still unsure when she married him, but I do believe she grew to love him.," Sarah reflects. "She began to enjoy her quiet life, stopped writing and fell pregnant at the age of 38."
But the newly content Charlotte, a woman no longer chasing dreams and rainbow's ends, lived only nine months as a wife.
Complications in the pregnancy claimed her and her unborn child.
Bront in Love by Sarah Freeman is published by Great Northern Books, priced 14.99. To order a signed copy, call 01274 735056 or visit www.greatnorthernbooks.co.uk.
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