by SAMANTHA ELLIS
Charlotte Brontë: A Life
By Claire Harman
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Why did the sheltered daughter of a Church of England minister, brought up to be deeply suspicious of Catholics, take the drastic step of walking into a Brussels church, finding a confessional and opening her heart? And what did she tell the priest? Claire Harman opens her biography, written in time for Charlotte Brontë’s bicentenary in 2016, with her protagonist in crisis. It’s not just that the 27-year-old student is in love with her married professor, Constantin Heger, but also that she is, Harman perceptively notes,
struggling with the larger issue of how she would ever accommodate her strong feelings – whether of love … or her intellectual passions, or her anger at circumstances and feelings of thwarted destiny – in the life that life seemed to have in store for her, one of patchy, unsatisfying employment, loneliness and hard work. What was someone like her, a plain, poor, clever, half-educated, dependent spinster daughter, to do with her own spiritual vitality and unfettered imagination?
Harman suggests the relief of confessing ‘gave her an idea not just of how to survive or override her most powerful feelings, but of how to transmute them into art. Within a year she was writing her first novel.’ For Harman, Brontë’s novels are ‘revolutionary’ because they express feelings we usually suppress. In other words, she lets us all into the confessional.
At fourteen, Brontë imagined one of her characters panicking that he might not be real, that someone had dreamed him up. She thrilled, Harman reveals, at ‘having this adult man in her mind muse on her when he senses the distant power or influence that has brought him into being, but that he can’t imagine is simply a fourteen-year-old girl bending over a tiny scrap of paper in a cold room in Yorkshire’. At other times, writing unnerved and disorientated Brontë; Harman astutely calls the wild writing she did in her late teens ‘greedy’ and ‘desperate’, and argues that it was only after her experience in Brussels that she found a way to stop dwelling on her suffering and instead ‘let it speak to and comfort millions of others’.
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