Dr. Charlotte Jones from the University of Oxford sparked the interest of the Brussels Brontë Group with her talk on May 10 on “The Brontës among the Moderns,” promising to show the influence of the literary sisters on eminent early 20th-century writers.
The topic was rather a new perspective for our group, so the audience was quite curious as to what she would have to say.
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Dr. Jones started with a quote from a character from the 1932 novel Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons:
“They were all drunkards, but Anne was the worst of the lot. Branwell, who adored her, used to pretend to get drunk at the Black Bull in order to get gin for Anne. … Secretly, he worked twelve hours a day writing “Shirley”, and “Villette” — and, of course, “Wuthering Heights”. I’ve proved all this by evidence from the three letters to old Mrs Prunty. ...… [Wuthering Heights is] his book and not Emily’s. No woman could have written that. It’s male stuff.”
Of course, this is obviously not meant to be taken seriously. The very idea of Anne being a drunk and Branwell being the real author of his sisters’ novels is ludicrous. However, it does to an extent illustrate how biography can warp facts. The moderns (including Virginia Woolf and May Sinclair, as we shall see later) were very conscious of this fact, as biographies were rather all the rage in the early 20th century.
There were in fact 24 fictionalized biographies of the Brontës published in this period, and psycho-biography was a popular form during the interwar period, Dr. Jones said. These were unfortunately generally full of sentimental cliches and wild speculation, and Dr. Jones suggested that the Brontës may have resonated so much at this period due the influence of Freud.
In November 1904, Virginia Woolf visited Haworth and she was so impressed that she wrote her first published essay (in The Guardian) on the Brontës, titled “Haworth, November 1904.”
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| Holograph draft of Woolf's essay Haworth, November 1904. Source: New York Public Library |
Woolf read and re-read the Brontës’ novels throughout her life, although her attitude to the sisters did change over the decades. In a 1916 essay written for Charlotte Brontë’s centenary, published in The Times Literary Supplement and later in The Common Reader (1925), Woolf argues that Jane Eyre allows direct access to the author:
“It is not possible, when you are reading Charlotte Brontë, to lift your eyes from the page. She has you by the hand and forces you along her road, seeing the things she sees and as she sees them. She is never absent for a moment, nor does she attempt to conceal herself or to disguise her voice. At the conclusion of Jane Eyre we do not feel so much that we have read a book, as that we have parted from a most singular and eloquent woman. - she is herself the heroine of her own novels”
Woolf writes that emotions in Charlotte’s novels are paramount — “I love, I hate, I suffer” — and this is not meant as praise. On the other hand, she seems to have consistently rated Emily more highly:
“There is no ‘I’ in Wuthering Heights. There are no governesses. There are no employers. … She looked out upon a world cleft into gigantic disorder and felt within her the power to unite it in a book.”“She could free life from its dependence on facts, with a few touches indicate the spirit of a face so that it needs no body; by speaking of the moor make the wind blow and the thunder roar.”
In the 1910s, Woolf was still young and not yet famous. At that time, she analysed the Brontës’ work (with the exception of Anne, who she largely ignored) in order to help figure out her own style, Dr. Jones said. By the time Woolf wrote A Room of One’s Own in 1928, her reading of the Brontës was more nuanced. She had surpassed the “Brontë stage” and grown out of them, so to speak. She makes Charlotte Brontë representative of all Victorian female novelists (except George Eliot) and says that although she had more genius than Jane Austen, she had defects and wrote too much from the perspective of her own emotions. As such, she sets a bad example for women writers:
“The woman who wrote these pages had more genius in her than Jane Austen; but if one reads them over and marks that jerk in them, that indignation, one sees that she will never get her genius expressed whole and entire. Her books will be deformed and twisted. She will write in a rage where she should write calmly. She will write foolishly where she should write wisely. She will write of herself when she should be writing of her characters. She is at war with her lot. How could she help but die young, cramped and thwarted?”Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1929)
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| Dr. Charlotte Jones |
Dr. Jones went on to talk about May Sinclair, never a central literary figure but nonetheless friends with Ezra Pound and his circle. It was Sinclair who coined the term “stream of consciousness” to describe the literary technique used by many modernist writers, including Virginia Woolf. Having said that, Woolf herself disliked Sinclair.
According to Dr. Jones, May Sinclair was the first critic to really appreciate Anne Brontë as a writer, praising the “transformative power” of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall:
“… the slamming of Helen’s bedroom door against her husband reverberated throughout Victorian England.”May Sinclair, introduction to The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1914)
She in fact wrote introductions to all the Everyman editions of the Brontë works published in the early 20th century. Sinclair felt that the Brontë biographers, including Mrs. Gaskell, never really appreciated what great writers they were, and in 1912 she wrote her own biography of the sisters, The Three Brontës. In 1914, she also published The Three Sisters, a novel obviously based on the Brontë siblings and which exhibits parallels with The Three Brontës.
Whilst Virginia Woolf deliberately turned against the Brontës’ influence, Sinclair embraced it. Completely against the publication of Charlotte Brontë’s letters to M. Heger, Sinclair was very careful with her own private correspondence, and Virginia Woolf similarly curated her own potential legacy.
The talk was rounded off with questions from the audience. One member interestingly suggested that interiority is multi-faceted, and that thought could be treated as part of emotion.
One of Dr. Jones’s final comments was that in her opinion, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is “quietly incredible.”
We can agree with that or not, but her talk undoubtedly gave the audience a lot of food for thought.
Georgette Cutajar