Charlotte and Emily

In its US release, Jude Morgan's Charlotte and Emily (initially published in the UK as a A Taste of Sorrow) comes equipped with a cover that screams "Gothic romance": two slightly soft-focused young ladies on a gloomy day, hair and gowns streaming in the wind, with a picturesque ruin close by.  Neither the new title nor the cover does much to accurately represent the novel, which is a) about the entire Bronte family, b) not particularly Gothic, and c) features only the tiniest smidgen of romance in about the last twenty-odd pages.  Instead, the novel explores the Brontes' vexed relationships to language and self-consciousness, their ongoing quest for "the right word" (213), and the ever-present test of death. 

The collaborative worlds of Angria and Gondal turn out to be simultaneously Edenic and threatening spaces--not because of what happens in them, but because of the act of creation itself.   Branwell's toy soldiers, suffused with imaginative possibility, turn authors themselves, and "relate in their own words their spacious narratives of daring and conquest" (81); Charlotte feels a "goose-fleshed thrill" at the "words" of one character, Mina, even as she herself imagines the words that Mina speaks (89), and is later convinced that she sees Zamorna "standing at the schoolroom door" (92).  Later, in despair over Monsieur Heger, Charlotte imagines a saddened Zamorna appearing before her, filled with "holes and gaps" through which "reality" shines (242).   The creations of Gondal and Angria manifest themselves vibrantly in their authors' various minds, magically developing their own agency, even seeming to write themselves.  At once more real than "reality" and yet ephemeral, the slow degeneration of these worlds both highlights the unbearable pressures of the Brontes' lives--especially Branwell's Richard Carstone-ish collapse--and the emergence of a different kind of imaginative production.  (Branwell's use of one character as an allegory for his own failure foreshadows how the worlds collapse into glum everyday life.)  These worlds are "self-sufficient" (82), solely for private consumption within the family circle, and any outside commentary would be a violation.  By contrast, the narrative actually underplays Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and the other mature novels, none of which rupture the boundary between reality and imagination for them in quite the same way.  (The novel-writing occupies less than a third of the novel.)   "'Jane Eyre wasn't real,'" Charlotte tells her eventual husband, even though he objects (364).   For the sisters, the novels turn out to be fictions (or deliberate fictionalizations), in a way that Gondal and Angria were not.    Although "something of its enchanted air" hovers over the new texts, the spontaneity and vitality of the juvenalia give way to language calibrated for public consumption--although not necessarily for the public's pleasure.   Unlike Gondal and Angria, the novels are in a sense uninhabited, not-lived-in; they are, for lack of a better word, objectified.     Charlotte comes to see herself as a professional, whereas Emily sneers that that's all "'[l]ook at me, love me, love me, please'" (310).   Far from asserting that public authorship is necessarily a liberating act, a means of finding the self, the novel suggests that Charlotte's self-making through professional authorship exists on the back of Emily's impassioned rejection of the audience itself, of the very idea that one could be known to the audience and yet left untainted--"'Sooner or later it would mean people getting their fingers into your head'" (313).   Not incidentally, the sisters enter into public authorship through Charlotte's invasion of Emily's privacy; one is left with the sense that Emily's short stint as an author consists of one long series of violations at her sister's hands.

One of the notable things about this novel, as it happens, is its skill in avoiding what I've called the transcription theory of authorship.  Although the plot occasionally reworks elements from one novel or another, usually Jane Eyre,  by and large Charlotte and Co. do not share their characters' experiences; we are not left feeling that the novels transparently render autobiographical details under altered names.   Charlotte's marriage to Arthur Bell Nicholls turns out to be happy and loving, but Nicholls is not Mr. Rochester, and poor Charlotte loses her virginity while suffering from a head cold.  That being said, I cannot help noting that, as per the usual, Morgan takes Charlotte's side against the calculating Mme. Heger, leaving me to wonder if anyone will concede that, perhaps, Mme. Heger might have had grounds for exasperation.  Moreover, William Carus Wilson succumbs to outright caricature, even though we do have at least some Victorian reports that contradict Jane Eyre.  "The Reverend Carus Wilson can picture hell most precisely," we are told, "and there the girls have long, long hair, and wear no clothes at all" (27). 

In fact, one of the oddest omissions from this novel's rendering of Charlotte's subjectivity is any indication of her religious faith.  That is, we know that she's a Protestant, as the matter comes up a few times, but there's no sign of the woman whose letters repeatedly give thanks to God for His blessings, or whose novels spill over with Biblical allusions.  Except for Mr. Nicholls, whose somewhat scanty dialogue usually doesn't involve religious matters, most of the novel's devout Christians suffer from hypocrisy (Carus Wilson), Bulstrodism (Patrick Bronte), general unpleasantness (the aunt), or a certain underhandedness (Mme. Heger); even Anne Bronte, generally regarded as the most conventionally Christian of the sisters, eventually suffers from her own religiosity and must moderate it.  In that regard, the novel suffers from the same imaginative blockage that characterizes most neo-Victorian fictions: the inability to imagine any protagonist for whom religion was inseparable from their everyday life, even when the religious worldview in question might well appeal to modern readers (both Charlotte and Anne were universalists, for example).   We have no sense that Charlotte might be able to do something transformative with her belief, or that belief might have fueled Charlotte's passions and drives, rather than repressing them.