I have it easy. I work, but am not beholden to anyone. I love, but am not reliant on others' good graces. I write, but am not required by polite mores to hide it from the world. I am female, middle class, and a writer at a time when those are not inherent handicaps. I am not intimidated into making my voice, my stature and my intellect smaller than they are, naturally or through ambition.
Charlotte, the eldest surviving Bronte sister, had gifts, abiding and abundant,of brilliance and insight, intellect and sensibility and the ill luck to be born at a less encouraging time. The Bronte siblings, of course, have come down to us in legend as sad symbols of ill fortune and neglected talent, wasted away and dead while hardly beyond youth. Branwell the ne'er-do-well, Emily the mystic, Anne the forgotten and Charlotte, for awhile, the survivor.
Charlotte, she of the longevity, lived to write more words and volumes than her sisters. Her legacy relies on much more than 'Jane Eyre', which is an accomplishment rich and textured, by turns dramatic, complex, yearning and simple.
'Villette' is a glowing achievement. Her Lucy Snowe is a heroine both worthy and ordinary, a woman of good family and little means with no greater ambition than making an independent, if limited, living. She is sensible, determined rather than brave, pragmatic yet undeniably individual.She is quietly defiant, yet unapologetic in her stance, only when there is no other way. She is not a character to be pigeon-holed as this way or that, as good or bad, lily-white or a vamp: this is what makes her irrefutably, appealingly modern.
Charlotte, with an existence that seems limited to modern eyes, was not a recluse by the standards of her day. She went away to school (it was this same educational institution that claimed the lives of her elder sisters), traveled to London, and taught, bittersweetly, abroad. As with so many informally or haphazardly educated nineteenth century female writers, the erudition of her literary voice, so powerful and keen, is extraordinary.
Although destiny kept it brief, she was the lone Bronte child to wed. It is believed that she was pregnant at the time of her death, just shy of 39. A sturdy,strong and profitable cult has grown up around the 4 Bronte siblings who made it to adult-hood.This was started with the publication, shortly after Charlotte's death, of a biased, not-exactly truthful biography written by Mrs. Elizabeth Gaskell, a casual friend. She is the source, with nothing solid to back it up, of Mr. Bronte's reported bad nature and occasional ill-treatment of his offspring. It is an image that has never entirely been shaken off, even after 150-years and countless better-sourced and researched critical studies. She is also the culprit behind the earlier-mentioned cliched images of the siblings which, at this juncture, seem hardly likely to budge.
The other 3 famous Bronte children are seemingly doomed to wander through eternity, desperately unhappy,and misunderstood: Branwell, forever a drunken adulterer, his artistry forgotten. Emily, the aesthete, walking the moors and yearning for, then welcoming, death. Anne, talented and neglected, living sadly and resignedly in her sisters' tall shadows.
Only Charlotte, granted an extra decade, seems a fully-fleshed, complex human being. She is neither a stock character, nor a literary genius created in a vacuum. She lived in a world, firm of earth and fresh of air, that is like ours, not something out of countless biographers' imaginations. Perhaps that, as much as her magical way of commanding words on ink and paper, is why she remains on our radar, on our shelves and in our hearts.
POSTSCRIPT
Enid Bagnold is little known today yet two words send familiar, colourful and energetic images spinning through our heads: "National Velvet". The film based on her novel made 12-year-old Elizabeth Taylor a star. It is charming, sweet, spirited and, after a fashion, dramatic. It remains a classic of its kind,, in both literature and film.
Additionally,she wrote The Chalk Garden, a play also adapted successfully to the silver screen.
The acclaimed English author--Lady Jones in her private life--had a career of impressive duration, dying at 90. She did a lot of interesting things in her time, more than can be chronicled in a few slim paragraphs. Her 'Autobiography' (yes, that is its title), published in 1969, is a good place to strike up your acquaintance.
CHARLOTTE BRONTE: April 21, 1816-March 31, 1855
ENID BAGNOLD: October 27, 1889-March 31, 1980
PHOTO: CHARLOTTE BRONTE
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