Charlotte Brontë: A Monograph

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Any new light on a personality so intense and interesting as Charlotte Brontë; would be right welcome. As Mr. Reid points out, Mrs. Gaskell labored under certain disadvantages when she wrote the 'Memoir,' too many of the persons directly affected by a full revelation being then living to allow her to write with the complete freedom that is desirable in dealing with such a life. Especially was it impossible to do this while Mr. Brontë lived. And yet she wrote so freely as to involve herself in various difficulties. Mr. Reid's main point, however, is that Mrs. Gaskell not only wrote under certain felt restrictions, but that she framed a stringent theory of her subject's character, and was too intent on making all the facts and documents bend to it. Mr. Reid therefore presents us with a selection from her letters to a school companion, to most of which Mrs. Gaskell did not refer at all, and from some of which she gave mere extracts. He connects these by narrative and running commentary of his own. Mr. Reid has done his work with fine sympathy, care, and enthusiasm, though with sometimes just that slight tendency to over celebration which it is so hard to escape from in such work. His monograph is most attractive and readable throughout, and the public is under no slight obligations to him for it.

But we do not feel that his new documents so entirely bear out his theory as we were led to expect. There can be no doubt that the peculiar influences amongst which the Brontës passed their childish days left effects which remained to the end, imparting to all three a strange reserve and morbidity. The vain, selfish father, taking his meals alone; the children left to their own resources, with no sympathetic touch of an elder to draw them out of themselves; the school-life at Cowan Bridge and other places, which confirmed the shy shrinking from their associates; and bitterly the cramped painful life lived in the society of their father and Branwell, the clever wreck—all were to the natures of the Brontës, and especially to that of Charlotte, like some rough surface chafing sensitive exposed flesh, while yet there was a sense of relief in the secret experience derived from each fresh exposure. Into her art she faithfully translated her life; but in her art—in the bulk of 'Jane Eyre,' the 'Professor,' and 'Villette' — do we not see this self-controlled determination to face unshrinkingly the almost morbid contact of the sensitive nerves with that which re-excites them? Along with all the shy shrinking from contact with strangers or the outside world, are we not now and then oppressed with the too naked revelations which Charlotte Brontë afforded of her own morbid experiences? The fascination of her stories, the sustained calmness of them—which mirrored her own calm and self-control —result chiefly from this; and the criticism which was untowardly directed against 'Jane Eyre,' from the moral side, does have some basis when restated from the artistic side. The experience is still too near, too intense, and as yet unveiled by the action of a strong and healthy imagination. In speaking of 'Villette,' Mr. Reid says that every sentence was wrung from her as though it had been a drop of blood, and the book was built up, bit by bit, amid paroxysms of positive anguish, occasioned in part by her own physical weakness and suffering, but still more by the torture through which her mind passed as she pictured scene after scene from the darkest chapter in her own life for the benefit of those for whom she wrote. This condition, did we find no trace of it in the writing itself, would be a powerful testimony to her dramatic genius; but it colors, directly or indirectly, the product, and imparts a certain subjective uniformity of tone, and a painfulness of feeling which fascinates but does not satisfy.….

– The British Quarterly Review [1877]