The Brontë Biographies: Romance, Reality, and Revision

Katherine Frank The BlOIltë Biographies.* Romance, Reality, and Revision As a species, Brontë biographers would seem to suffer from an "ancient mariner" complex: they feel compelled to tell their tale over and over. More than forty major lives of the Brontë family have been written since Mrs. GaskelPs 1857 biography of Charlotte.1 They are perhaps the most exhaustively documented and well-studied figures in literary history. The only comparable biographical phenomenon that comes to mind, in fact, is the current plethora of works on Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group. Yet the extraordinary fascination of the Brontë and Bloomsbury cults is similar only in intensity and numbers. We are drawn to Woolf and her circle by the wide range of their intellectual and artistic achievements, their creation of a real community of hearts and minds, their sexual openness and freedom, and finally, of course, by their frankly unconventional and even sensational way of life. Bloomsbury's attraction is that of a Parnassian utopia, the antithesis of what we encounter when we turn to the meagerness , brevity and frustration of the Brontë story: four children and their old father living impoverished, uneventful lives in a remote Yorkshire village. What impels biographers to repeat this simple history so often, and why have they never lacked a large audience of wedding guests eager to hear the familiar tale told yet once more? One of the most recent Brontë biographers, Margot Peters, provides an explanation for the Brontes' appeal when she defines the peculiar nature of the Brontë glamor: The Brontë glamor is the glamor of fame deified by suffering. They are canonized, these sisters, by the tragedy of their lives. The tragedy itself 142 biography Vol. 2, No. 2 has all the appeal of the romantic past. What twentieth-century city dweller would not like to undergo the torments of solitude in a moorland village? In an age where sexual gratification has become as causal as picking one's teeth, does not the frustration of unrequited love possess a peculiar charm? And what antisepticized, tube-drawn patient dying in the sterile whiteness of a modern hospital would not rather expire quickly at home on a couch of a picturesque, wracking, consumptive cough? Sentimentality—the luxury of thinking about emotion without feeling it—draws people to the Brontes as flowers draw bees.2 But the issue, the need behind the appeal, is actually more complex than sentimental Haworth hagiography. In many cases Brontë biography has become a kind of posthumous Brontë novel. For the canon is too small—just seven novels. We want more. An abundance of biographers are willing, and all the novelistic materials are at hand for another Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights or Tenant of Wildfell Hall: Cowan Bridge School, Rev. Cams Wilson, Calvinistic Aunt Branwell, the white-haired patriarch shooting his pistol out the bedroom window , childhood loss, frustrated love, opium and adultery, tuberculosis , early death, and behind it all, of course, the vast expanse of the moors and the stone house up on the hill buffeted by wuthering winds, sleet, and snow. The Brontë legend in short. It is no coincidence, then, that a remarkably high proportion of Brontë biographies have been written by novelists (though most, with the exceptions of Mrs. Gaskell, May Sinclair, and Muriel Spark, of distinctly second-rate powers). As one of them, Ernest Raymond, confesses, "It would appear that there is a craving in every novelist to write one book about the Brontes."3 To pick up the standard of their fallen heroines is an irresistible temptation it seems. And so we have a whole tradition of "the last Brontë novel" biographies, anathema to serious Brontë critics and scholars, but perennial best sellers and favorites among the enthusiasts of the Brontë cult. Mrs. Gaskell was both the initiator and high point of this tradition, and her Life of Charlotte Brontë dwarfs all subsequent Brontë biographies much as Boswell overshadows all later lives of Johnson. The Life of Charlotte Brontë is not a "sentimental novel" as one historian of literary biography has dismissed it.4 But it does exhibit the almost inevitable flaws of subjectivity, inaccuracy and suppression that characterize most "life-relationship" biographies. From...