I couldn't love Charlotte Bronte as a character myself, though she didn't need my love, of course. At the same time, I love the novel "Jan Eyre" in sincerest, most passionate way, which for me is not all about some adult love (Samantha Ellis in her book How to be a Heroine very aptly noticed that the Bronte sisters always slightly poured in their love books through the Gothic, an outrageous land, because they didn't know how prosaic true love could be - maybe that's what Charlotte of the Arthur Nichols period realized, but the incredible, aspen-black with the whistling "Wuthering Height Pass" wind in her ears came out so incredible that all the love in little Emily's head lived and boiled somewhere in her head; Charlotte then, editing Emily's poems for posthumous publication, will write a rather clumsy preface to her sister, which looks like a badly imposed tone, Emily will come out in it Ophelia, who instead of Hamlet drove the talent crazy) - so, not about some adult love, but about something very childish, tangible, connected with some discovery of the world and amazing things in it.
Charlotte Bronte might have been offended to find out that from her best novel I have picked out things that round up the world, not make my heartbeat against rocks. In 1848, Bronte (then still under the guise of Carrera Bell) corresponded with the critic Lewis - everyone remembers this correspondence, of course. Charlotte struggles to please Lewis, Lewis condescendingly teaches her to write - both, in general, good. Lewis advises Carrera Bell to read Austen, and Bell writes him a passionate rebuke that for him there is no artist, no creative person without poetry and passion. Later, in a letter to her publisher William Smith Williams, she will call Austen an incomplete lady, a lady unfinished, if I may say so because her books were past passions, storms, thunderstorms, and feelings.
And I could have loved even such a Charlotte, despite the fact that my favorite literary character is Flora Post of the "Uncomfortable Farm", who loves everything to be clean and tidy and does not like to be asked to speak out about something important. Such Charlotte - with Thornfield burning in her heart - is a figure who deserves if not love, then respect. But I always remembered that little family scene that made us lose Emma Brown. Charlotte, who finally got married, brings her husband the first two chapters of Emma Brown. Arthur Nichols reads them and sour notices that writing is still not a woman's business. And here we can't even reproach Arthur Nichols too much, he was a typical Victorian priest, for whom women were always separated from the church bench and limited to the parish - unfortunately, the church. These women have a certain sphere in which they exist - and their existence keeps a man afloat, well, like beacons on the rocks to be, you know where to dock. And it is not clear what will happen if they suddenly turn into wandering lights.
After this conversation, Charlotte humbly puts the manuscript in the table, and after a while dies - massive toxicity, a weakened body, deadly flu. And for the sake of such moments when she puts this damn manuscript in the table, I would like to invent the time machine. To sit there, grab it by the shoulders, shake it properly and say - well, where is your passion, where is your poetry, where are your instincts? Okay, in general. There is no typewriter, there is no book. Charlotte Bronte doesn't need my love, just as Charlotte Bronte didn't need Jane Austen.
But her novels still need our love, because the whole world is now celebrating the four hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare's death - he is trumpeted, he is smoked, in his honor to people from the stage goes Cumberbatch. And Charlotte - a provincial, ugly Charlotte, with red cheeks like apples and very bad teeth - looks again against this background of that terribly insecure and terribly talented woman, who is always set as an example of a father and mother of English - Mr. Shakespeare and Miss Austen. She has no choice but to defend herself and burn her bridges with a verb.
So if we can't go back two hundred years and save Emma Brown from Arthur Nichols, today, I think we should at least save Charlotte Bronte from Shakespeare so that she doesn't go back into the shadows with her unfinished two chapters.
So, three books about the Bronte sisters:
- How to be a Heroine by Samantha Ellis - a very decent and cheerful memoir of reading, in which, among other things, Ellis disassembles the novels of the Bronte sisters.
- The Bronte Myth by Lucasta Miller is, in my opinion, the best study of the phenomenon of a mythologization of the Bronte sisters in the form of Yorkshire hormonal clicks. With the analysis of letters, documents, diaries and common sense.
- The Bronte Cabinet by Deborah Lutz is a fascinating study of three lives in nine subjects. Deborah Lutz tries to understand how the three Bronte's literary sisters lived by describing their belongings.