hexafu

Margot Peters

Early Sorrow

In April of 1820 those natives of Haworth who chanced to be at their windows or toiling up the narrow stone street of the village would have been entertained by the sight of a canvas-covered wagon followed by seven carts heavily laden with household goods plodding up the steep incline.

Patrick Brontë, the new incumbent of Haworth church, had arrived with his family and all his worldly possessions to take up residence in the gray stone parsonage on top of the hill behind the church.

The children in the wagon were young and rather frail. The eldest, Maria, was only seven; the youngest, Anne, an infant in arms. And there were four others huddled together in the swaying wagon: Elizabeth, Charlotte, Branwell, the only boy, and Emily.

Maria Branwell Brontë, the wife of the new pastor, was even more frail than her children. Diminutive and delicate of constitution, she was already thirty when she married Patrick Brontë. In true nineteenth-century style, she had rapidly borne him six children in seven years. Now, much weakened, she unprotestingly came to face the rigors of the bleak and raw climate of this Yorkshire village, so different from the sunny warmth of her native Penzance on England’s mild southwest coast.

We know Maria Brontë because nine love letters written to Patrick during their courtship have survived. Addressed with increasing warmth to “My Dear Friend,” “My Dearest Friend,” and “My Dear Saucy Pat,” the letters are a touching blend of formality and frankness. The formality is expected in a woman of her time; it is the unusual frankness that plainly reveals a fine, delicate mind.

Her protestation that her love is stronger than his might be taken for coy angling in another, but the sincerity radiating from every line of the letters makes this in Maria’s case a simple statement of truth.

She writes in October 18th from her uncle’s home, Woodhouse Grove, near Leeds, where she is visiting:

With the sincerest pleasure do I retire from company to converse with him whom I love beyond all others. Could my beloved friend see my heart he would then be convinced that the affection I bear him is not at all inferior to that which he feels for me – indeed I sometimes think that in truth and constancy it excels. But do not think from this that I entertain any suspicions of your sincerity – no, I firmly believe you to be sincere and generous, and doubt not in the least that you feel all you express. In return, entreat that you will do me the justice to believe that you have not only a very large portion of my affection and esteem, but all that I am capable of feeling, and henceforth measure my feelings by your own. Unless my love for you were very great how could I so contentedly give up my home and all my friends – a home I loved so much that I have often thought nothing could bribe me to renounce it for any great length of time together, and friends with whom I have been so long accustomed to share all the vicissitudes of joy and sorrow? Yet these have lost their weight, and though I cannot always think of them without a sigh, yet the anticipation of sharing with you all the pleasures and pains, the cares and anxieties of life, of contributing to your comfort and becoming the companion of your pilgrimage, is more delightful to me than any other prospect which this world can possibly present. I expected to have heard from you on Saturday last, and can scarcely refrain from thinking you unkind to keep me in suspense two whole days longer than was necessary, but it is well that my patience should be sometimes tried, or I might entirely lose it, and this would be a loss indeed! Lately I have experienced a considerable increase of hopes and fears, which tend to destroy the calm uniformity of my life. These are not unwelcome, as they enable me to discover more of the evils and errors of my heart, and discovering them I hope through grace to be enabled to correct and amend them…

…In general, I feel a calm confidence in the providential care and continued mercy of God, and when I consider His past deliverances and past favours I am led to wonder and adore. A sense of my small returns of love and gratitude to Him often abases me and makes me think I am little better than those who profess no religion. Pray for me, my dear friend, and rest assured that you possess a very, very large portion of the prayers, thoughts, and heart of yours truly,

M. Branwell.

Besides love, another theme runs through the nine letters like a troubled whisper: a persistent, morbid self-doubt. Maria Branwell was from all accounts an extremely pious woman. Long years of maiden-hood during which her emotions were channeled almost solely into religious feeling intensified the ardent piety of an already religious mind. Yet hers seems to have been the piety that breeds as much apprehension as confidence. It is sad to find such an obviously good person feeling abased and unworthy, or brooding on the evils and errors of her heart. This self-doubt enters into her relationship with her fiancé: she is uneasy when expected letters do not arrive punctually; she fancies a coolness in his tone; she asks, “Do you think you have any cause to complain of me? If you do, let me know it.” Patrick Brontë, decisive and self-assured, had the upper hand in this marriage.

Maria Brontë passed on her highly developed piety to her eldest daughter, her namesake Maria, and its mystical aspect to Emily; Charlotte inherited almost nothing of it. But she felt strongly drawn to her mother’s memory, and it is curious that, without knowledge of her mother’s letters, she put words into the mouth of her heroine, Jane Eyre, that so closely coincide with Maria Bronte’s sentiments.

In a letter written a few months before their marriage, Maria begs Patrick to pray for her because she fears that he is replacing God as the first object of her love: “I feel that my heart is more ready to attach itself to earth than heaven,” she confesses. Says Jane Eyre, with more eloquence, “My future husband was becoming to me my whole world; and more than the world: almost my hope of heaven. He stood between me and every thought of religion, as an eclipse intervenes between man and the broad sun. I could not, in those days, see God for his creature: of whom I had made an idol.”

Twenty-nine years after his wife’s death, Mr. Brontë put these letters into Charlotte’s hands. Reading the words of the mother she had known so briefly, Charlotte was deeply moved. “A few days since,” she wrote a friend, “a little incident happened which curiously touched me. Papa put into my hands a little packet of letters and papers, telling me that they were mamma’s, and that I might read them.

I did read them, in a frame of mind I cannot describe. The papers were yellow with time, all having been written before I was born: it was strange now to peruse, for the first time, the records of a mind whence my own sprang; and most strange, and at once sad and sweet, to find that mind of a truly fine, pure, and elevated order. They were written to papa before they were married. There is a rectitude, a re-finement, a constancy, a modesty, a sense, a gentleness about them indescribable. I wish she had lived, and that I had known her.’

But Maria Brontë did not live long to share in her husband’s pilgrimage, as she so humbly phrased her fondest wish. A few months after the family arrived in Haworth she was driven to her bed, stricken with cancer. Á pall fell on the household. The six quiet children became even more subdued and dependent on themselves, for their suffering mother did not often want to see them. Quietly, they would leave the house, Maria and Elizabeth shepherding the littler ones, and walk out hand in hand on the moors that rose in barren brown swells behind the parsonage. An old woman came to help nurse Mrs. Brontë. For Mr. Bronte, faced with clerical duties, the responsibility for six children, and a dying wife, the period of Maria’s illness was a nightmare.

“… all the prudence and skill I could exercise would have availed me nothing had it not been for help from above,” he later wrote to his former vicar. “… one day, I remember it well; it was a gloomy day, a day of clouds and darkness, three of my little children were taken ill of a scarlet fever; and, the day after, the remaining three were all in the same condition. Just at that time death seemed to have laid his hand on my dear wife… She was cold and silent and seemed hardly to notice what was passing around her. This awful season however was not of long duration. My little children had a favourable turn, and at length got well; and the force of my wife’s disease somewhat abated.”

The improvement in Maria’s health did not last long, however. She began to sink rapidly. Although in great pain, she was cheerful and uncomplaining in front of her children and the servants; one day, feeling a little better, she begged to be raised up in bed so that she could watch the nurse clean the grate because “she did it like it was done in Cornwall.” But there were countless long dark hours when bitter thoughts of her seemingly unfulfilled life, of her health ruined by childbearing, and of her children left motherless shook her religious faith to its foundations.

“During many years she had walked with God, but the great enemy, envying her life of holiness, often disturbed her mind in the last conflict,” admitted her husband, and he wrestled with her doubt and depression for hours in the darkened sick-room, fighting to help her preserve her faith in God.

More doctors were called in, but they could offer no hope. On the twenty-second of September 1821, Maria Brontë was carried through the low gate of the parsonage wall to be laid under the stone floor of her husband’s church. Her last words still echoed in the quiet house:

“Oh, God, my poor children-oh, God, my poor children!”

How indeed to raise six small children? The most obvious solution to the problem was a new wife. Two months after his wife’s death Patrick Brontë wrote a proposal of marriage to Elizabeth Firth, a friend of the family from Thornton, the Brontë’s residence prior to Haworth and the birthplace of Charlotte, Branwell, Emily, and Anne. In a friendly but decisive way, she rejected his proposal.

His thoughts then turned to his twenty-ninth year, his first curacy in Wethersfield, Essex, and a young parishioner named Mary Burder. A lodger in her aunt’s home, the tall, good-looking Irish curate with high cheekbones, thick red hair, and aquiline nose had met and won the affections of the girl. Mysteriously, the courtship had not ended in marriage; evidently Mr. Brontë thought the match not quite good enough for him. Now, however, he took up his pen to write, first to her mother and then to Mary Burder herself:

Dear Madam,-

The circumstance of Mrs Burder not answering my letter for so long a time gave me considerable uneasiness; however, I am much obliged to her for answering it at last. … I experienced a very agreeable sensation in my heart, at this moment, on reflecting that you are still single, and am so selfish as to wish you to remain so, even if you would never allow me to see you. You were the first whose hand I solicited, and no doubt I was the first to whom you promised to give that hand.

However much you may dislike me now, I am sure you once loved me with an unaffected innocent love. and I feel confident that after all which you have seen and heard, you cannot doubt my love for you. It is now almost fifteen years since I last saw you. This is a long interval of time and may have effected many changes. It has made me look something older. But, I trust I have gained more than I have lost, I hope I may venture to say I am wiser and better. … I have a small but sweet little family that often soothe my heart, and afford me pleasure by their endearing little ways, and I have what I consider a competency of the good things of this life…. I want but one addition to my comforts, and then I think I should wish for no more on this side eternity. I want to see a dearly Beloved Friend, kind as I once saw her, and as much disposed to promote my happiness. … My dear Madam, all that I have to request at present is that you will be so good as to answer this letter as soon as convenient, and tell me candidly whether you and Mrs Burder would have any objection to seeing me at Finchingfield Park, as an Old Friend.… I cannot tell how you may feel on reading this, but I must say my ancient love is rekindled, and I have a longing desire to see you…

Most Sincerely,

P. Brontë.

It is hard to imagine a worse beginning than a reminder to the lady that she is still single. It is difficult to conceive a more egotistical and patronizing tone. And could the connection between the sudden revival of Mr. Bronte’s “ancient love” and the “small but sweet little family” be made any clearer?

Miss Burder retaliated with such scathing hostility that clearly she not only found Mr. Brontë’s proposal insulting but had been nursing a grievance against her jilter all fifteen years. “My present condition upon which you are pleased to remark has hitherto been the state of my choice and to me a state of much happiness and comfort,” she sneers, Warming to her theme, she goes on to list her blessings: she has, she tells him, the kindest and most indulgent of parents, sisters, and brothers; no domestic cares and anx-jeties; no husband to control or oppose her; and – unkindest cut of all – a handsome income. In short, she feels “no willingness to risk in a change so many enjoyments in possession.” Remarking that she truly sympathizes with him and “the poor little innocents” in their bereavement, she cannot, however, resist a final stab. “The Lord,” she suggests pointedly, “can supply all your and their need”!

Mr. Brontë was stung by the letter and wrote a bitter reply; and he made no more proposals for a while. But the most pressing problem of the children’s supervision was solved temporarily, for his sister-in-law, Miss Branwell, who had come from Cornwall after Maria’s death, agreed to stay on at the parsonage for the time being. Moving into the best bedroom, where she promptly shut all the windows and ordered the servant to get up a roasting fire against the Yorkshire damp and chill, Miss Branwell undertook the management of the household with a strict, fussy, but not unkindly hand.

The death of their mother was a deeply traumatic experience for the six young Brontë children. It created in the eight-year-old Maria a sense of responsibility which made her preternaturally old and sober. It created in all the children an insecurity so severe that it can be said without exaggeration that all their lives not one of them was able to cope successfully with the world outside the parsonage walls. At the same time, it drove them together; they clung to each other like tender vines, deriving all their comfort and strength from their intense emotional and physical unity.

Left to themselves (for Mr. Brontë was not a companionable kind of father and Miss Branwell not a kindred spirit, the children were, however, far from unhappy. They had no hoops, or rocking horses, or children’s books because they were poor and because Mr. Brontë did not believe in indulgences.

They had no playmates, for the Brontës had always kept to themselves, fulfilling parish duties but never associating with the villagers on social terms. They did not miss toys or friends, however, because their precocious imaginations forged into the adult world where real heroes and villains like the Duke of Wellington and Napoleon waged military and political battles that made childish games pale by comparison. Political events in London had for them the excitement other children find in fairy tales or dolls, and they awaited the arrival of the three periodicals to which Mr. Brontë subscribed with passionate eagerness.

The small, delicate, gifted Maria would take a newspaper into the study, shut herself up, and devour the fine columns of print; emerging, she could report with minute accuracy the complex details of parliamentary debate. At the same time the atmosphere of austerity, soberness, and rectitude which pervaded the spotless, sparely furnished parsonage created – in the girls, at least—a moral precocity as well.