Nick Holland on faith and the Brontë sisters

He is the author of In Search of Anne Brontë, Emily Brontë – A Life in 20 Poems and Aunt Branwell and the Brontë Legacy. He is working on a new book about Charlotte Brontë and her best friend Ellen Nussey. 

A self-confessed Anne superfan (Superfanne?), Nick also writes the blog In Search of Anne Brontë where he posts weekly about the Brontës and their circle. 

 

Nick started off his talk about the attitude of the Brontë children towards religion by giving a general outline of their parents' background and religious roots. The son of a poor Protestant Irish farmer and his Roman Catholic wife, the young Patrick Brontë worked as a weaver. In spite of his limited opportunities to get an education, he was an avid reader, and one day the Rev. Andrew Harshaw was intrigued to discover this young man reading The Pilgrim's Progress. 

 

Wanting to help Patrick reach his intellectual potential, the Rev. Harshaw took him into one of his schools, where Patrick eventually became a teacher and a headmaster. Patrick also tutored the children of the wealthy Rev. Thomas Tighe, who arranged for him to go to Cambridge and be ordained as a priest of the Church of England. 

Maria Branwell, on the other hand, came from a much wealthier background, from a prosperous family of very religious Methodists (the Methodists were still part of the Church of England at that time). Two of her sisters, Jane and Elizabeth, were to influence Maria's children in different ways — but more of that anon. 

 

So how did religion affect the lives of Patrick and Maria's famous children? Firstly, as the children of Haworth Parsonage's rector, they were expected to be religious, helping parishioners and teaching Sunday school. There is no doubt that they all attended church services and that they all had a very good understanding of the Bible. According to our speaker, the Brontë girls had rather varying attitudes towards religion, which he labelled: Doubt, Defiance and Devotion. Nick refrained from categorising Branwell, but did touch upon how Branwell fits into this later in the talk. 

 

Although always a believer in God and Christianity, Charlotte Brontë also had religious doubts. To illustrate this, Nick quoted from the passage in Jane Eyre where Jane asks Helen, who is dying, “What is God? Where is God?” She also seems to seek assurance from Helen about the afterlife: “You are sure, then, Helen, that there is such a place as heaven, and that our souls can get to it when we die?” Very radical questions for a vicar’s daughter to be asking. 

Nick suggested that they in fact come from Charlotte’s own doubts, which he believes stemmed from Charlotte’s experience at Cowan Bridge School, where in 1825 seven pupils out of 53 died of consumption. That and the prevailing trend of Calvinism in the Church of England’s teachings at the time must have had a great effect on the young Charlotte. 

 

Charlotte’s admiration and friendship with Harriet Martineau also suggests that she was open to different thinking. Martineau was an outspoken atheist who criticized the “superstitions of the Christian mythology.” In spite of this, Charlotte admired her and took the initiative to ask her publisher to arrange for her to travel to Martineau’s home in the Lake District to meet her. They apparently got on famously. 

 

In Villette, we also see the struggle between Protestantism and Catholicism. Charlotte was very harsh towards Catholicism, which she referred to as “papistry” and the “Romish religion.” She considered it to be a “tyrant church” and is very critical of it in Villette. 

 

 

“Vain are the thousand creeds 

That move men's hearts, unutterably vain, 

Worthless as withered weeds 

Or idlest froth amid the boundless main” 

          From No Coward Soul is Mine by Emily Bronte 

 

According to Nick, this quote encapsulates Emily’s belief that all faiths are vanity. Whilst she did believe in God, her true religion was nature, as we can see in Wuthering Heights, where organised religion has no real place. At first, I thought, but what about Joseph and his religious tirades? But actually on reflection, I figured that the odious Joseph and his obsessed, hypocritical religious rantings only serve to confirm that religion indeed has no place in the novel, as he in fact epitomises all that is “wrong” with it. 

Emily indeed only went to church because it was expected of her, not because she believed in it. Her father was apparently very fond of her, and she may even have been his favourite child. 

 

Nick postulated that Emily’s poetry is very revealing about her feelings and that nature was her cathedral. He quoted quite extensively from several of her poems to illustrate this. Her belief was that God was in her, and she was in God. This is clearly illustrated in her poem The Philosopher: 

 

“Three gods, within this little frame, 

Are warring night; and day; 

Heaven could not hold them all, and yet 

They all are held in me …” 

She also talked of visions coming to her at night, and Nick suggested that this is when she might have done her writing, the “inky sea” which resulted from the point at which the three rivers (gods) met up. 

 

From The Philosopher: 

“I saw a spirit, standing, man, 

Where thou dost stand — an hour ago, 

And round his feet three rivers ran, 

Of equal depth, and equal flow — 

A golden stream — and one like blood; 

And one like sapphire seemed to be; 

But, where they joined their triple flood 

It tumbled in an inky sea …” 

 

According to Nick, this is a very unique attitude towards religion. He said that Emily was probably considered quite an eccentric in her time, although she was very well-loved by all who knew her, even in Haworth at large. 

 

 

Anne Brontë was a devout Christian who believed in Universal Salvation — very different from the elitist tenets of Calvinism. After her death, Charlotte said that Anne had suffered from religious melancholy, but Nick disagrees with this, because Anne believed that we could all be forgiven. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, which is a very powerful book, also features a storyline of religious forgiveness. Helen forgives her husband Arthur in spite of his being a truly awful man, as she believes that God would also forgive him. 

 

James La Trobe, the eminent Moravian pastor, had visited Roe Head school and spoken to Anne when she was ill with typhus. Nick believes that this influenced Anne greatly, notably the notion that we can all be forgiven if we accept Christ. In an 1848 letter to the Rev. David Thom, Anne is joyous in God, in her faith, even though Emily had just died days before. An author of several books on the subject of Universal Salvation, the Rev. Thom had initially written to Anne after reading The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. 

Anne replied as follows: 

 

In a letter to Ellen Nussey that Anne wrote when she knew she was dying, Anne said that she was not afraid to die, although she felt that she had lived “to so little purpose.” Nick said he believes that had she lived longer, she would have written about religion and how all can be forgiven. Anne died in Scarborough, a “good” death, quiet and without fuss, he said. 

 

Nick wrapped up his talk by touching upon the curious issue of Charlotte Brontë’s confession in Brussels to a Catholic priest (emulated by Lucy Snowe in Villette). Why did Charlotte, who was so opposed to this “Romish” faith, decide to take such a step? According to Nick, the guilt of loving M. Heger weighed so much on her mind that she felt she needed to speak to someone about it and took the opportunity to do so. Writing to Emily about it, however, she urged her not to tell their father. Although we’ll never know what she actually confessed, Nick believes that we can safely assume that loving Heger would have been the main “confession” she would have made. 

 

As for Branwell Brontë, Nick believes that he too had faith, although of course it is well known that he lost his way in life and fell victim to drug use and unfortunate love affairs. During his very last moments, he stood up to embrace his father and said “Amen.” 

 

It is evident that faith impacted the Brontës’ lives in ways that it doesn’t impact ours today, even if we happen to be religious. 

 

Following this talk, there were a few interesting questions from the audience, one being about how Branwell would fit into the categories of Doubt, Defiance and Devotion. Nick replied that he doesn’t fit into them at all, but that he was rather like the Prodigal Son. He got lost, but came back at the end of his life. 

 

Another interesting question was about Aunt (Elizabeth) Branwell and her influence on Anne. Apparently, Aunt Branwell took snuff and was generally a very cheerful person. She was very close to Anne and they even shared a room. Nick suggested that the storyline of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is very likely based on their Aunt Elizabeth’s stories of the Brontë siblings’ Aunt Jane Branwell, who abandoned her drunkard husband in Australia and escaped back to England with her son. When Aunt Elizabeth died, Branwell wrote to a friend that she had been the guide to all his childhood happiness, and Nick believes that, all considered, we probably would not have any Brontë books if it were not for Aunt Branwell. 

  Georgette Cutajar