Was marriage fatal for Charlotte Brontë's writing career, or was it the attainment of the love she desperately sought, asks Clare Boylan.
On an evening at the end of 1854, as Charlotte Nicholls sat by the fire with her new husband, she remarked: "If you had not been with me, I must have been writing now." The former Miss Brontë then ran upstairs and brought down the tale she had begun. She read aloud the two chapters which introduced a lost girl, exquisitely dressed, abandoned in a provincial boarding school by a father with a bogus identity. Arthur Nicholls observed that critics might accuse her of repetition for again using the setting of a school. A brilliant beginning may well have been condemned to the bottom drawer by this mild criticism from her well-meaning but uncreative husband.
Reader, she married him. In June 1854, at the age of 37, Charlotte Brontë, "looking like a snowdrop", became the wife of the Rev Arthur Bell Nicholls. One of the most celebrated authors of her day, with the runaway success of Jane Eyre having taken America as well as England by storm, she set aside her pen and devoted herself to her duties as a clergyman's wife.
The groom, an Irishman, and curate to the novelist's clergyman father, Patrick Brontë, has been described by Brontë biographer Lyndall Gordon as "a man of Puseyite dogmatism" and "a sturdy, steady practical man, not much given to thought".
"I cannot conceal to myself that he is not intellectual; there are many places into which he would not follow me intellectually," the bride admitted. Her friend, Ellen Nussey, considered him "too obtuse to be mated with a being like Charlotte".
Brontë lived only nine months after her marriage. Had she survived, would she have resumed writing? Nussey alleged that Nicholls did all in his power to stop her, and it is easy to see why a writer accused by one critic of "outrages on decorum" would have made a challenging consort for a conservative man of the cloth, but can Charlotte have guessed that marriage would mean the end of her career? One small pointer suggests that she did.
The new novel, to which she had given a working title of Emma, was begun at a particularly significant stage in her life. In November 1853, she had just finished writing Villette and was secretly (against her father's wishes) corresponding with Nicholls. What is remarkable about the manuscript of Emma is that it is written in the same tiny script as her juvenilia. The rest of her adult work was penned in a very regular hand.
To me, this suggests that, in her mind, marriage and a career were incompatible so she was, effectively, writing in secret.
It wasn't only her writing that was forfeit. After the real, female identities of Acton, Ellis and Currer Bell became known, Brontë took full advantage of the opportunity to befriend authors such as William Makepeace Thackeray, Harriet Martineau and Mrs Gaskell. Now, she was confined to the limited existence against which she had earlier protested. Had she made the biggest mistake of her life?
For a clue, one must look to her own fiction. Two heartfelt themes predominate. One is the plight of intelligent girls without means, doomed to lonely, limited lives as governesses or schoolmistresses. The other is the right of plain, insignificant females to a life of love and passion. These powerful feminist motifs struck a chord in the breasts of many thousands of stranded Victorian females.
But the author was not a feminist in the conventional sense. Her protests were in regard to her own plight. Two years before the publication of Jane Eyre she had written to Nussey: "The trouble is not that I am a single woman and likely to remain single - but that I am a lonely woman and likely to remain lonely."
When Nicholls first asked for her hand he was practically laughed off the stage. Brontë had hitherto reserved her affections for fine-minded men, such as Constantin Heger, her volatile and lively-minded married tutor at the Pensionnat Heger in Belgium, and George Smith, her book-loving and encouraging publisher. The Rev Nicholls was not in their league. His proposal threw Patrick Brontë into a furious rage and drew a cold negative from Charlotte, who had earlier turned another Irish suitor down on the grounds he was "deficient in the dignity and discretion of an Englishman". Patrick Brontë had grown up in a family of 10 in a two-roomed cottage in Co Down. His own remarkable intellect got him through Cambridge without any funds, but Ireland was what the family had "risen above".
Brontë expected Nicholls to go off with his tail between his legs, but she was soon to make an interesting discovery. What the curate lacked in broad intellectualism, he made up in fervid romantic imagination. When serving communion to his beloved, he burst into tears - and the well-informed congregation wept too. So what changed her mind? It may have been a bleak conviction, expressed so poignantly to Patrick Brontë: "Father, I am not a young girl nor a young woman, even - I never was pretty. I now am ugly." Some believe it was a pay-back to George Smith, who married someone else. If so, she made little effort to elicit his envy. When she wrote to tell him of her engagement she added: "My expectations are very subdued." If Nicholls's romantic nature came as a surprise, more revelations were to follow. From her honeymoon in Ireland, Brontë wrote of her "relief that his Irish relations were not pipe-smoking hoydens". Modesty had prevented Nicholls from revealing that he was, by birth, a gentleman. His family seat, Cuba House in Banagher, Co Offaly, was a fine house. Far from sinking on the social scale, Mrs Nicholls had risen several rungs.
Although initially she seemed to find marriage claustrophobic, her husband's dogged affection was to find its target. Much of the author's own edgy and aggressive earlier pursuit of love had to do with her belief that she was unlovable. Fame had brought her public adulation but not the affection she craved. Now she was finding out what it was to be loved for herself alone. No one reading Jane Eyre could doubt that Brontë had a sensual nature. (Remember Mr Rochester so deliciously asserting that beneath Eyre's well-governed exterior "the passions may rage like true heathens".) Could it be that her awkward, passionate mate became her Mr Rochester, and she his Jane Eyre? The idea is not so far-fetched as might first appear.
Love and passion had always been rich in fantasy for Brontë. It would have been far easier to dissolve into a romance of her own devising than that which practical fate had placed in her path.
Soon after her unwise sharing of the Emma fragment with her husband, she discovered she was pregnant. Doctors reassured her that the nausea of her early pregnancy was perfectly normal, but four months later she was dead. It may have been hyperemesis, or the consumption that had killed all her siblings. The diagnoses are varied. The only thing that can be confirmed is that she had come to love the man she married. In a last, faintly- pencilled note to Nussey, she wrote: "As to my husband, my heart is knit to him."
It is impossible to say she made a wrong decision, for she had succeeded brilliantly in the two things for which she campaigned: she had risen above the circumstances of her life and she had found love.
After her death the two chapters of her new novel were published in the Cornhill Magazine. Curiously, it was her narrow-minded clergyman husband who sanctioned its post-mortem publication, despite a chapter-ending that was considered controversial at the time. If he had killed her career in her lifetime, he proved anxious to keep it alive after her death.
Almost 150 years later, a chance remark to a Brontë biographer at a literary festival put me in touch with Brontë's unfinished work. A twist of fate had once more delivered the reluctant Irishwoman into Irish hands. The great success of Brontë's life and work was her capacity to turn adversity to gain, to make use of all and everything that was tohand. I hope she might have taken a gamble on one more unlikely marriage, for this was a book that was simply too good not to be finished. We can never know how Brontë herself would have proceeded with her last, and possibly her finest, novel. The great, passionate Brontë heart cannot be replaced or recalled. A word of sage advice, though, came via the remarkable body of her existing work: love and grief are the bread and wine of literature, but a good sense of irony keeps both within the bounds of taste.
Clare Boylan's latest novel, Emma Brown, a continuation of the Emma fragment by Charlotte Brontë, is published by Little Brown on September 10th. Clare Boylan reads at Waterstones, Dawson Street, Dublin on Wednesday, September 10th at 6.30 p.m.