The Brontës in Childhood

The Brontës in Childhood

(c) Copyright (2017) by Kathleen Spaltro

All Rights Reserved

Numerous dramatizations of the Brontë sisters' fiction have preceded the recent excellent British miniseries about their lives, "To Walk Invisible." With all of the Brontës' gift for melodrama, they could hardly have invented a family history more lurid or terrible. When Maria Branwell Brontë, their mother, died shortly after the family's move to Haworth in rural northern England, she left 6 children 7 years old and younger in the care of a desolate widower who disliked small children in any case and who now avoided them because they awoke memories of his wife.

Tragedy in Triplicate

The eldest, Maria, assumed the role of mother to Elizabeth, Charlotte, Branwell, Emily, and Anne. When their father, the Reverend Patrick Brontë, sent his 4 older girls to a residential school for clergymen's daughters, physical and emotional abuse by teachers and administrators—combined with ignorance of sanitation and with contaminated or inedible food—so undermined the health of Maria and Elizabeth that they left the school, only to die at home. Thus, Charlotte, Branwell, Emily, and Anne—now 9, 8, 7, and 5 years old—lost their mother twice in less than 4 years.

Twenty-three years later, as the trauma of triple bereavement recurred for Charlotte and her father, she herself connected the earlier with the later deaths:  "It is over. Branwell—Emily—Anne are gone like dreams—gone as Maria and Elizabeth went 20 years ago."  Of "the autumn, the winter, the spring of sickness and suffering," of the 8 months disfigured by their successive deaths from the family's scourge, tuberculosis, she wrote, "I should have thought—this can never be endured."

Endure it she did, only to re-encounter a malignant fate. The love and marriage that she had thought impossible came, despite her father's vehement opposition, bringing much-belated joy. But marriage to the Reverend Arthur Nicholls also brought pregnancy to 38-year-old Charlotte—pregnancy fecund with death for both her and her baby. "Oh," she helplessly protested to her deeply grieved husband, "I am not going to die, am I?  He will not separate us, we have been so happy."

And yet, while such a history—lived out in a parsonage surrounded on 3 sides by graves—certainly inspires pity and terror, out of it somehow came irreplaceable classics of English literature. The 3 surviving sisters all managed to realize their gifts as much as fate allowed, but their brother, Branwell, as an adult created nothing lasting and indeed perished, both physically and emotionally, consequent to his drunken and drugged self-destruction. The siblings' disunited adulthood followed their extraordinary childhood, one of intense happiness fashioned by grief and of deep emotional sustenance fostered by neglect.

Pairing Off

The children's grief over their mother's and their sisters' deaths—combined with their father's emotional remoteness and physical absence as well as with similar qualities in their remaining caretaker, their maternal Aunt Branwell—caused them to turn to one another. Heightened by their lifelong habit (except for Branwell) of little converse with their Haworth neighbors, their reliance on one another created very profound and prolonged emotional bonds. This closed circle of sibling intimacy also resulted in their entertaining themselves by fantasizing about, and then writing poems and stories concerning, extremely elaborate imaginary countries. This habit, most satisfying to their precocious imaginations, developed their literary skill but also unfitted them in various ways for more ordinary social life and for the trials of earning money. 

After Maria and Elizabeth died at Haworth, until Charlotte left for another residential school, she, Branwell, Emily, and Anne spent the next 5-and-a-half years flourishing under the detached governance of Aunt Branwell and Papa. Inspired by their father's gift of a set of toy soldiers to Branwell, they began taking the parts of characters in group games that evolved into a saga about the Glass Town Confederacy. Charlotte and Branwell began to write the saga down when she was 13 and he was 12. Their imaginative partnership coincided with their growing emotional intimacy as coauthors and "twins." 

The Glass Town Confederacy acquired a capital, Glass Town, later renamed Verdopolis. Not content with a mere confederacy, Charlotte and Branwell imagined an empire, Angria. These 2 older children displayed enormous energy and wide-ranging curiosity. Charlotte created tiny volumes (4.5 by 3.25 inches) containing an average of 20,000 words or more, 1,200 words to a handprinted page. Emily and Anne, at 13 and 11, impatient with Branwell's militaristic and political obsessions, seceded and developed the antithetical, female-dominated Gondal. Their new imaginative partnership also coexisted with a profound emotional "twinship." More than a childish invention, Gondal was the secret life they shared at each hour of every day. 

Charlotte and Branwell continued to elaborate upon the Angrian situation until she was 29 and he was 28, and Gondal actually outlived its rival empire. Prolonged twinship and imaginative absorption created for all 4 siblings for many years deep creative and emotional satisfaction. 

"You Are the 3 Suns"

Haworth Parsonage being a charmed enclosure, what would happen later to them as they ventured outside it?  Highly stimulated emotionally and imaginatively by these completely secret imaginary worlds, each would have trouble adjusting to outsiders, though to varying degrees; all would find it difficult, if not impossible, to substitute everyday reality for the far-preferable fantasy lands. Their social awkwardness, their unhappiness earning their living, and their boredom with the mundane all resulted in part from their finding their fantasy kingdoms (and one another) far more absorbing than anything else life offered. They seemed to experience some difficulty, not only in relinquishing the fantastic, but also in clearly distinguishing it from commonly accepted reality. 

Charlotte later clearly mourned the difference between reality and fantasy, Branwell grew to prefer states of mind artificially created by alcohol and opium, and Emily always remained indifferent and impervious to outside pressures of any kind. Somewhat paradoxically, her immunity to the outside world demonstrates strength of mind and character. Anne also displayed these qualities but did so quite differently from Emily. Suffering least from the family confusion of reality with fantasy and compromising most easily with the external world, Anne surpassed all of her siblings in her ability to remain employed.

The siblings' prolonged emotional and imaginative bonding thus, in varying ways, complicated their adjustment to the world outside the parsonage but also promoted the development of their gifts. Maladjustment to reality, however, sundered the brother from his sisters and created a new triad.

A memory of Charlotte's friend Ellen Nussey of her July 1847 visit to Haworth beautifully symbolizes the nurturance of genius that the adult sisters now provided to one another. Ellen and the sisters witnessed on the moors 2 parhelia, optical illusions that paired the sun with 2 reflections of itself. "That is you," Ellen remarked, "You are the 3 suns."

First published in The Woodstock Independent