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A review by girlwithherheadinabook
The Brontë Myth by Lucasta Miller
5.0
Review originally published here: http://girlwithherheadinabook.co.uk/2016/04/review-the-bronte-myth-lucasta-miller.html
When I wrote my guest post for the start of this week, I wanted to examine the way in which the Brontës had come to be perceived down the centuries. I named my topic "The Brontë Myth". Shortly afterwards, I discovered through my reading that Lucasta Miller had written an acclaimed book with the same title back in 2002. Predictably, I decided to Find Out More. What I discovered was a compelling and concise account of Brontëmania, as well as a fascinating examination of the art of biography itself. In terms of brooding material, frankly I had struck gold.
This was utterly different to the two other biographies I read for Brooding about the Brontës, since Miller is less interested in the traditional linear approach and in essence, her story really starts around 1855 when Charlotte died and the myth-making really moved into over-drive. However, Miller swiftly unmasks Charlotte as the first myth-maker, pointing out that far from being the innocent and unknowing parson's daughter who accidentally stumbled upon writing one of the finest novels in the English language, Charlotte was an ambitious writer who wrote as a teenager to the poet Robert Southey explaining her desire 'to be forever known'.
We see Charlotte's myth-making in the biographical notice she wrote for each of her sisters, when she attempted to protect their reputations by claiming that they were too innocent to understand what they were writing and certainly intended no offence. She play-acted as Currer Bell. Miller casts a dubious eye over the myth of Charlotte as socially anxious, pointing out that on one occasion, Charlotte was supposed to be shaking in terror after being introduced by Thackeray as the author of Jane Eyre, but to others it seemed as if she was in fact seething in rage.
Mrs Gaskell here steps in. Her role within the Brontë myth is a very unsettling one and while she may have intended no malice, she certainly caused untold hurt. She seems to have had a strange fascination with the life of her 'friend', appearing even to befriend Charlotte only to find out more. Gaskell was determined to find Haworth Parsonage remote and unpleasant, so was disappointed to discover that cheery flowers grew in the window boxes - in her Life of Charlotte Brontë, she was careful to emphasise that they weren't particularly nice plants. Gaskell wanted the Parsonage to be a Gothic house of horrors, so that Charlotte only wrote unsettling books as a symptom of her suffering. Despite their friendship, Charlotte was irritated by the stories cast about by Gaskell and Harriet Martineau that she was sickly and suffering, claiming that in their eyes 'I shall be a sort of invalid' and Miller points out one biographer's theory that this was the reason that George Smith never proposed - he believed Gaskell's story-telling.
life of charlotteAfter Charlotte's death, Gaskell was approached to write the official biography after several upsetting rumours had caused pain to the family. What Arthur and Patrick seemed unaware of was that it was Mrs Gaskell who had started the rumours in the first place. They both learnt to their personal cost that it is unwise to put the biography in the hands of a novelist, particularly one like Mrs Gaskell. Unlike Charlotte, Mrs Gaskell's novels tend towards the 'morally improving' brand - Miller takes particular pleasure in ripping apart Ruth, whereby Gaskell seeks to draw sympathy to the fates of fallen women by writing a novel about one, but then is too afraid about the consequences to her own reputation to write her convincingly. Thus Ruth may be seduced, but it seems to happen without her noticing and she remains otherwise angelic. Miller's implication is clear - someone like Mrs Gaskell was never going to understand as complex and contradictory a being as Charlotte.
Yet, it is Mrs Gaskell who began the Brontë myth-making which is still happening today. Time and again, Miller points out how subsequent biographies follow her trail in 'walking up to the Parsonage', rich in purple prose describing the remote and grim setting. Visitors to the Parsonage were always surprised to find it a pleasant building in the middle of a thriving village, only a few steps away from the library and post office. Contrary to rumour, Charlotte could not look out the window and see the tragic graves of her siblings - they were buried inside the church. They also travelled and took part in local cultural activities. Gaskell reported some of these facts but was always careful to point out that joy died for Charlotte at the age of nine when her sisters passed away. After that, according to Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell, she never experienced a moment of happiness again.
Miller emphasises how far this fits into the Victorian template of ideal heroine - a true saintly heroine dies at the end of the book. Gaskell rewrote Charlotte to being exactly one such, but one has to wonder how far she would have appreciated it. Charlotte was the creator of Jane Eyre, consummate survivor who abjured self-denial as foolish and insisted that God had not given her life to simply throw it away. I was reminded too of the attitude of Charlotte's best friend Mary Taylor - in Miss Miles, one of her heroines Dora complains of her situation that people would prefer it if she died as it would make a tidier story but she stubbornly refuses to do so and instead is determined to live on and thrive. Miller's distaste for this fashion is clear, particularly Gaskell's incredible insensitivity in publishing anecdotes about Charlotte's underwear size and private correspondence, none of which had been in the remit outlined by Patrick and Arthur. I was particularly disgusted by Gaskell's implication that Patrick's unpleasantness caused the death of his wife Maria - one cannot help but feel that cancer was more deserving of blame there.
More than anything though, this fashion took away from Charlotte the novelist. Gaskell steered well away from the 'upsetting' elements of her work, preferring to stick with stories about Charlotte peeling potatoes in secret so that the family servant Tabby did not have to. Even though it was Emily who mostly kept house, Gaskell recasts Charlotte as the ultimate dutiful daughter to a domestic tyrant - the angel in the house. Gaskell also completely omitted any reference to Charlotte's passion for her teacher Monsieur Heger, although she was clearly uneasy lest the correspondence ever come out, knowing that her version of events would be forever sullied. The 'bomb', as Miller describes it, finally went off in 1918 and the result for Brontëmania was messy.
Gaskell put the blame for the 'coarseness' or 'morbidity' of the girls' writing on the effects of witnessing Branwell's behaviour. Indeed, she even made a very (very) thinly veiled attack on Lady Scott, erstwhile Mrs Robinson who had an affair with Branwell, claiming that in corrupting him, she not only hastened his end but also that of his sisters. The book even includes a call for her to repent. Lady Scott sued, Gaskell's husband settled and the section was removed in the next edition. The problem of Branwell, how to excuse him, how to explain him has persisted down the centuries - despite the paucity of his literary output, in this book he gets more coverage than does Anne.
The interesting thing was how Charlotte could appear as an example for young girls in conduct books, but then her books themselves would be held as inappropriate. Charlotte was a saint not because of her literary talent, but because she stayed home and looked after her horrible father and her sufferings were so terrible that she was carried off to heaven. Yes she wrote some books but she could be forgiven for that. In discovering Charlotte had a passionate side, that she wrote of wanting recognition from Heger - for many of her devoted fans, this became a betrayal. For May Sinclair, who held passionately to her spinsterdom, her furious rejection of the evidence has the note of personal grief.
By contrast, the myth-making around Emily tends towards painting her as a mystic. As such an innocent, utterly uneducated, surely she would have been incapable of writing a book like Wuthering Heights. It could only have come to her in a vision. Again, Miller is mildly sardonic as she recounts the varying accounts and theories, some of which render Emily as more animal than human, none of which seem to have stopped to recognise that she read books. A particularly purple passage has Emily walking with her family in the moors 'making noises' which those close to her know are expressive of 'joy' - no wonder the theory that Branwell wrote Wuthering Heights gained traction.
Another popular theory had it that Emily must have had a lover to have inspired her work, culminating in a particularly hilarious incident in the 1930s when biographer Virginia Moore was unable to read Emily's handwriting and so concluded that her poem 'Love's Farewell' was actually entitled 'Louis Parensall' - so Emily must, necessarily, have had a French lover. Deciding that Emily must have had assignations with him in Branwell's portrait studio in Bradford, the theory was doing fairly nicely until someone pointed out the obvious.
This was another of those books where practically every page feels worthy of noting down. Having written (in far shorter form and with only a fraction of the research) on a similar topic, reading Miller's book felt like sitting down for coffee with a new friend and breathlessly agreeing with their every utterance. Miller has trawled through the vast hoards of Brontë biography and mercilessly lists even the most ridiculous of theories, particularly prevalent in her chapter on the fashion of 'psychobiography'. One pointed out that Charlotte died aged thirty-eight, the same age that her mother had passed away. Naturally this meant that subconsciously, Charlotte had never recovered from her mother's death and that she instead chose to die at the same age since she could not surpass her. Another theory held that Emily wrote Wuthering Heights with thirty-four chapters since that was the age that Jesus was when he died. At this point, Stella Gibbons' Mr Mybug begins to look quite normal.
My only criticism would be how little the book had to say about Anne. It is true that very few of the myths touch on her - but that in itself is interesting. There is something in the power of three - if there had been only Charlotte and Emily, I do wonder if the myths would have grown so huge. The Brontës are 'the weird sisters', and they are more than just a duo. Miller notes rather philosophically that Emily's true personality (and presumably that of Anne as well) may very well have been lost in the maelstrom of all of the biographies. It is risky even to read too much into their poetry given that so much of it was rooted in their imaginary world of Gondal. Yet Emily's star rose as Charlotte's fell - no longer a saint due to her passion for a married man, Charlotte became instead the cold-hearted spinster who wrote for commercial gain rather than due to a visitation of the creative muse. Even Juliet Barker's seminal biography is rather unsympathetic towards her - the reader has learnt to distrust Charlotte's version of events.
Yet I feel that even a non-Brontë fan could enjoy The Brontë Myth for the efforts it puts in to deconstruct the art of biography itself. Miller examines how each new generation feels the need to 'discover' the Brontës in a fresh way, how new approaches tease out new theories. Yet, the aim of biography itself has shifted. Increasingly it is recognised that nobody has but one self, indeed many of us have thousands. Those who lauded Charlotte as paragon may have been misled, but surely it is equally erroneous to label her a harridan. The Brontë Myth is almost meta-fictional in its birds-eye view of Brontë-mania and biographical writing as a whole, examining the journey from hagiography (Gaskell), to psychobiography and on to where we are now. One can almost picture Miller's curled lip when she describes one early biographer who explained that 'happy people are not writers', but on the whole she shows a remarkable sympathy to the fact that people do wish to write and rewrite their interpretations of the Brontës. Even where a theory is light on evidence, Miller is willing to be charitable if the author has shown a genuine attempt to connect with their subject.
Yet there is a tragedy around all of this story-telling - Miller notes that when she explained to an acquaintance that she was writing a book on the Brontës, they said vaguely, "Oh yes, those were fictional characters, weren't they?" I myself became a Brontë fan at the age of five when I first visited the Parsonage, years and years before I read the books. There is a detachment between the notion of the Brontës the novelists and the Brontës the inhabitants of Haworth. With the final lines, Miller urges us to 'turn the tables' and consider the novels first. Through this week, I have realised that I am as guilty as the next reader of disregarding the texts - I have been biased against Charlotte because as a five year-old, I thought she looked bossy in her portrait. I preferred Anne perhaps for simply being the youngest. Before they were the Brontë Sisters, they were the Brothers Bell, because they wanted to be judged for their works alone - the time is here to look away from the portrait with the washed out Branwell looming from the beyond and instead look to their works.
When I wrote my guest post for the start of this week, I wanted to examine the way in which the Brontës had come to be perceived down the centuries. I named my topic "The Brontë Myth". Shortly afterwards, I discovered through my reading that Lucasta Miller had written an acclaimed book with the same title back in 2002. Predictably, I decided to Find Out More. What I discovered was a compelling and concise account of Brontëmania, as well as a fascinating examination of the art of biography itself. In terms of brooding material, frankly I had struck gold.
This was utterly different to the two other biographies I read for Brooding about the Brontës, since Miller is less interested in the traditional linear approach and in essence, her story really starts around 1855 when Charlotte died and the myth-making really moved into over-drive. However, Miller swiftly unmasks Charlotte as the first myth-maker, pointing out that far from being the innocent and unknowing parson's daughter who accidentally stumbled upon writing one of the finest novels in the English language, Charlotte was an ambitious writer who wrote as a teenager to the poet Robert Southey explaining her desire 'to be forever known'.
We see Charlotte's myth-making in the biographical notice she wrote for each of her sisters, when she attempted to protect their reputations by claiming that they were too innocent to understand what they were writing and certainly intended no offence. She play-acted as Currer Bell. Miller casts a dubious eye over the myth of Charlotte as socially anxious, pointing out that on one occasion, Charlotte was supposed to be shaking in terror after being introduced by Thackeray as the author of Jane Eyre, but to others it seemed as if she was in fact seething in rage.
Mrs Gaskell here steps in. Her role within the Brontë myth is a very unsettling one and while she may have intended no malice, she certainly caused untold hurt. She seems to have had a strange fascination with the life of her 'friend', appearing even to befriend Charlotte only to find out more. Gaskell was determined to find Haworth Parsonage remote and unpleasant, so was disappointed to discover that cheery flowers grew in the window boxes - in her Life of Charlotte Brontë, she was careful to emphasise that they weren't particularly nice plants. Gaskell wanted the Parsonage to be a Gothic house of horrors, so that Charlotte only wrote unsettling books as a symptom of her suffering. Despite their friendship, Charlotte was irritated by the stories cast about by Gaskell and Harriet Martineau that she was sickly and suffering, claiming that in their eyes 'I shall be a sort of invalid' and Miller points out one biographer's theory that this was the reason that George Smith never proposed - he believed Gaskell's story-telling.
life of charlotteAfter Charlotte's death, Gaskell was approached to write the official biography after several upsetting rumours had caused pain to the family. What Arthur and Patrick seemed unaware of was that it was Mrs Gaskell who had started the rumours in the first place. They both learnt to their personal cost that it is unwise to put the biography in the hands of a novelist, particularly one like Mrs Gaskell. Unlike Charlotte, Mrs Gaskell's novels tend towards the 'morally improving' brand - Miller takes particular pleasure in ripping apart Ruth, whereby Gaskell seeks to draw sympathy to the fates of fallen women by writing a novel about one, but then is too afraid about the consequences to her own reputation to write her convincingly. Thus Ruth may be seduced, but it seems to happen without her noticing and she remains otherwise angelic. Miller's implication is clear - someone like Mrs Gaskell was never going to understand as complex and contradictory a being as Charlotte.
Yet, it is Mrs Gaskell who began the Brontë myth-making which is still happening today. Time and again, Miller points out how subsequent biographies follow her trail in 'walking up to the Parsonage', rich in purple prose describing the remote and grim setting. Visitors to the Parsonage were always surprised to find it a pleasant building in the middle of a thriving village, only a few steps away from the library and post office. Contrary to rumour, Charlotte could not look out the window and see the tragic graves of her siblings - they were buried inside the church. They also travelled and took part in local cultural activities. Gaskell reported some of these facts but was always careful to point out that joy died for Charlotte at the age of nine when her sisters passed away. After that, according to Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell, she never experienced a moment of happiness again.
Miller emphasises how far this fits into the Victorian template of ideal heroine - a true saintly heroine dies at the end of the book. Gaskell rewrote Charlotte to being exactly one such, but one has to wonder how far she would have appreciated it. Charlotte was the creator of Jane Eyre, consummate survivor who abjured self-denial as foolish and insisted that God had not given her life to simply throw it away. I was reminded too of the attitude of Charlotte's best friend Mary Taylor - in Miss Miles, one of her heroines Dora complains of her situation that people would prefer it if she died as it would make a tidier story but she stubbornly refuses to do so and instead is determined to live on and thrive. Miller's distaste for this fashion is clear, particularly Gaskell's incredible insensitivity in publishing anecdotes about Charlotte's underwear size and private correspondence, none of which had been in the remit outlined by Patrick and Arthur. I was particularly disgusted by Gaskell's implication that Patrick's unpleasantness caused the death of his wife Maria - one cannot help but feel that cancer was more deserving of blame there.
More than anything though, this fashion took away from Charlotte the novelist. Gaskell steered well away from the 'upsetting' elements of her work, preferring to stick with stories about Charlotte peeling potatoes in secret so that the family servant Tabby did not have to. Even though it was Emily who mostly kept house, Gaskell recasts Charlotte as the ultimate dutiful daughter to a domestic tyrant - the angel in the house. Gaskell also completely omitted any reference to Charlotte's passion for her teacher Monsieur Heger, although she was clearly uneasy lest the correspondence ever come out, knowing that her version of events would be forever sullied. The 'bomb', as Miller describes it, finally went off in 1918 and the result for Brontëmania was messy.
Gaskell put the blame for the 'coarseness' or 'morbidity' of the girls' writing on the effects of witnessing Branwell's behaviour. Indeed, she even made a very (very) thinly veiled attack on Lady Scott, erstwhile Mrs Robinson who had an affair with Branwell, claiming that in corrupting him, she not only hastened his end but also that of his sisters. The book even includes a call for her to repent. Lady Scott sued, Gaskell's husband settled and the section was removed in the next edition. The problem of Branwell, how to excuse him, how to explain him has persisted down the centuries - despite the paucity of his literary output, in this book he gets more coverage than does Anne.
The interesting thing was how Charlotte could appear as an example for young girls in conduct books, but then her books themselves would be held as inappropriate. Charlotte was a saint not because of her literary talent, but because she stayed home and looked after her horrible father and her sufferings were so terrible that she was carried off to heaven. Yes she wrote some books but she could be forgiven for that. In discovering Charlotte had a passionate side, that she wrote of wanting recognition from Heger - for many of her devoted fans, this became a betrayal. For May Sinclair, who held passionately to her spinsterdom, her furious rejection of the evidence has the note of personal grief.
By contrast, the myth-making around Emily tends towards painting her as a mystic. As such an innocent, utterly uneducated, surely she would have been incapable of writing a book like Wuthering Heights. It could only have come to her in a vision. Again, Miller is mildly sardonic as she recounts the varying accounts and theories, some of which render Emily as more animal than human, none of which seem to have stopped to recognise that she read books. A particularly purple passage has Emily walking with her family in the moors 'making noises' which those close to her know are expressive of 'joy' - no wonder the theory that Branwell wrote Wuthering Heights gained traction.
Another popular theory had it that Emily must have had a lover to have inspired her work, culminating in a particularly hilarious incident in the 1930s when biographer Virginia Moore was unable to read Emily's handwriting and so concluded that her poem 'Love's Farewell' was actually entitled 'Louis Parensall' - so Emily must, necessarily, have had a French lover. Deciding that Emily must have had assignations with him in Branwell's portrait studio in Bradford, the theory was doing fairly nicely until someone pointed out the obvious.
This was another of those books where practically every page feels worthy of noting down. Having written (in far shorter form and with only a fraction of the research) on a similar topic, reading Miller's book felt like sitting down for coffee with a new friend and breathlessly agreeing with their every utterance. Miller has trawled through the vast hoards of Brontë biography and mercilessly lists even the most ridiculous of theories, particularly prevalent in her chapter on the fashion of 'psychobiography'. One pointed out that Charlotte died aged thirty-eight, the same age that her mother had passed away. Naturally this meant that subconsciously, Charlotte had never recovered from her mother's death and that she instead chose to die at the same age since she could not surpass her. Another theory held that Emily wrote Wuthering Heights with thirty-four chapters since that was the age that Jesus was when he died. At this point, Stella Gibbons' Mr Mybug begins to look quite normal.
My only criticism would be how little the book had to say about Anne. It is true that very few of the myths touch on her - but that in itself is interesting. There is something in the power of three - if there had been only Charlotte and Emily, I do wonder if the myths would have grown so huge. The Brontës are 'the weird sisters', and they are more than just a duo. Miller notes rather philosophically that Emily's true personality (and presumably that of Anne as well) may very well have been lost in the maelstrom of all of the biographies. It is risky even to read too much into their poetry given that so much of it was rooted in their imaginary world of Gondal. Yet Emily's star rose as Charlotte's fell - no longer a saint due to her passion for a married man, Charlotte became instead the cold-hearted spinster who wrote for commercial gain rather than due to a visitation of the creative muse. Even Juliet Barker's seminal biography is rather unsympathetic towards her - the reader has learnt to distrust Charlotte's version of events.
Yet I feel that even a non-Brontë fan could enjoy The Brontë Myth for the efforts it puts in to deconstruct the art of biography itself. Miller examines how each new generation feels the need to 'discover' the Brontës in a fresh way, how new approaches tease out new theories. Yet, the aim of biography itself has shifted. Increasingly it is recognised that nobody has but one self, indeed many of us have thousands. Those who lauded Charlotte as paragon may have been misled, but surely it is equally erroneous to label her a harridan. The Brontë Myth is almost meta-fictional in its birds-eye view of Brontë-mania and biographical writing as a whole, examining the journey from hagiography (Gaskell), to psychobiography and on to where we are now. One can almost picture Miller's curled lip when she describes one early biographer who explained that 'happy people are not writers', but on the whole she shows a remarkable sympathy to the fact that people do wish to write and rewrite their interpretations of the Brontës. Even where a theory is light on evidence, Miller is willing to be charitable if the author has shown a genuine attempt to connect with their subject.
Yet there is a tragedy around all of this story-telling - Miller notes that when she explained to an acquaintance that she was writing a book on the Brontës, they said vaguely, "Oh yes, those were fictional characters, weren't they?" I myself became a Brontë fan at the age of five when I first visited the Parsonage, years and years before I read the books. There is a detachment between the notion of the Brontës the novelists and the Brontës the inhabitants of Haworth. With the final lines, Miller urges us to 'turn the tables' and consider the novels first. Through this week, I have realised that I am as guilty as the next reader of disregarding the texts - I have been biased against Charlotte because as a five year-old, I thought she looked bossy in her portrait. I preferred Anne perhaps for simply being the youngest. Before they were the Brontë Sisters, they were the Brothers Bell, because they wanted to be judged for their works alone - the time is here to look away from the portrait with the washed out Branwell looming from the beyond and instead look to their works.