A Certain Slant of Light

I finished Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Bronte, which may take the prize for “biography that other biographers have been trying to fight in an alley for the longest time,” since they’ve been going at it for 170 years near with no sign of stopping soon.

Gaskell has the insuperable advantage of being an excellent and evocative writer in her own right, whose word pictures of the wind wuthering around the parsonage in the desolate churchyard of Haworth are indelible whatever their faults in mere “fact.” Although, again, Charlotte Bronte’s friend Mary Taylor felt that Gaskell’s biography was too happy, but perhaps as much as anyone in this benighted world was prepared to accept without cavilling!

Moreover, Gaskell also has the even more insuperable advantage of actually knowing Bronte, and some of my favorite parts of the book are her accounts of the visits and letters they exchanged. For instance, Gaskell sent Bronte an outline of her latest novel, and Charlotte importuned her to let the heroine live. Then when Gaskell came to visit Charlotte in Haworth, during one of their confidential evening talks, Gaskell admitted to Charlotte that she didn’t like Lucy Snowe in Villette, which Charlotte accepted with equanimity.

In contrast, Charlotte was very hurt when her friend Harriet Martineau criticized Villette for coarseness, in particular because the female characters (in Martineau’s judgment) are interested in nothing but love. This is is perhaps a bit unfair, as she had asked Martineau to tell her if she ever thought her work was coarse (Charlotte had also been quite hurt and puzzled by the critics who alleged this quality in Jane Eyre, which is why she asked), but although generally Charlotte preferred an unpalatable truth to a lie, perhaps this just struck her too much on the raw.

(Gaskell’s opinion on the alleged coarseness of some of Bronte’s work is, one, Charlotte was an angel and if you see coarseness in her work it is because YOU are coarse, so there, and two, if there is any coarseness, remember that she was brought up in isolation without a mother to guide and protect her, so can you blame her? Can you? CAN YOU, YOU MONSTER?)

Gaskell also ships Charlotte Bronte/Arthur Bell Nicholls with an endearing intensity. (Also, did you know that famously plain little Charlotte Bronte received four marriage proposals over the course of her life? She must have had a way with her.)

I was however interested to learn from a footnote added by the editor in 1900 that people were already alleging that Nicholls got in the way of Bronte’s writing. Since they were only married nine months before she died, I think we have to return a verdict of Not Proven: people are often unproductive during a major life change, Charlotte Bronte in particular often went months without writing much, and we just don’t know if she would have written more novels if she lived. (Although one can say the same about if she had continued on living single! She really struggled to finish Villette because the solitude in the parsonage after her sisters’ deaths was so unbearable.)

I am sorry that I couldn’t get my mitts on a facsimile of the first edition (I checked the Gutenberg version, and it’s also a third edition), because that’s evidently where all the really lively bits are. It has the descriptions of Patrick Bronte the World’s Most Spartan Father (probably slander from a servant who was sacked), the facts about Anne and Emily’s unscrupulous publisher Mr. Newby (“which I refrain from characterising, because I understand that truth is considered a libel in speaking of such people,” Gaskell writes acidly, having been forced to retract her earlier statements), and the Bronte family’s version of whatever happened between Branwell and Mrs. Robinson, who may have only ever had an affair with Branwell in Branwell’s heated imagination anyway?

But Mrs. Robinson also threatened a libel suit, so by the third edition she goes unmentioned and Branwell loses his job for no particular reason, although the years-long descent into drunken perdition thereafter is clear enough.

A really enjoyable read! (Sometimes in a “oh god Charlotte PLEASE accept an invitation from one of the MANY people who are begging you to come visit them because it might cheer you up a little to be away from the house where all you can think about is your dead sisters” sort of way.) I’ll be interested to compare it to a later biography when I get around to reading one.

Like most of Daphne Du Maurier’s books, The Infernal World of Branwell Bronte is a gripping read, and as a work of literature I enjoyed it very much. As a biography, it’s marred by Du Maurier’s willingness to extrapolate wildly from Branwell’s fiction to his life.

Although Branwell, unlike his sisters, never published anything, in his youth he wrote an extraordinary amount in what he and Charlotte called their “infernal world”: a huge outpouring of stories and poetry set in their fictional country of Angria. This world, Du Maurier suggests, became Branwell’s coping mechanism, a retreat from an increasingly disappointing reality, until at last that reality grew so miserable that the infernal world no longer offered an escape. Thereafter Branwell’s rapid decline into alcoholism and death.

The break came when Branwell was abruptly fired from his post as tutor in the Robinson household. The classic explanation has been that Branwell was carrying on an affair with Mrs. Robinson (pause for Simon & Garfunkle), but Du Maurier thinks that the affair was probably entirely one-sided, if it existed at all. Perhaps Branwell fell for Mrs. Robinson, and worked up his unrequited crush into a tragic tale of thwarted mutual passion as a salve to his amour propre after he lost his job.

Or indeed, maybe the crush never existed: maybe Branwell was just romancing up an excuse to explain why he had been fired yet again. Once he told the lie, he couldn’t back out without losing face, so he had to keep repeating it; and perhaps, Du Maurier suggests, he came to believe the story he made up. At the end of his life, she believes, he was truly losing contact with reality.

Du Maurier’s theory is that Branwell’s drinking, which the Brontes saw as the root of his problem, was in fact an attempt at self-medication. Certainly the letters she quotes show that he was deeply depressed for the last few years of his life, and Du Maurier thinks that Patrick Bronte may have seen the seeds of nervous trouble much earlier than that. She further argues that perhaps Branwell had epilepsy, and either epilepsy and nervous trouble (which were considered related in the 19th century anyway) would explain Patrick Bronte’s unusual step in teaching a promising son entirely at home rather than sending him to school.

In fact, it struck me as I was reading that the Bronte daughters had many of the advantages that usually accrued to sons. Branwell was taught at home, while the girls were sent to school. Branwell had no money, while the girls all inherited legacies from their Aunt Branwell. She expected the gifted Branwell would make his own way, while the girls might need a competency to keep them after their father died. But in fact, had Patrick Bronte died, Branwell would have had to live on his sisters’ charity, as Jane Austen and countless other women lived on their brothers’.

If Branwell had also gone to school—if he had the same modest competency put by—if he, metaphorically, had the same “room of his own” that his sisters did—might he too have published a novel? Du Maurier doesn’t argue that he was as talented as the others, but perhaps he could have survived to be the other other other Bronte, instead of the drunken afterthought.

Wednesday Reading Meme a day late this week on account of the New Year!

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Penelope Lively’s A Stitch in Time, because I thought it was a time-slip novel, but in fact there’s a lot of musing about the nature of time and only the dimmest glimmers of timeslip: the squeak of a swing that’s no longer there, the glimpse of a long-ago girl’s face in the glass before her old sampler. Bit of a disappointment really.

Also Susan Cooper’s The Magic Maker: A Portrait of John Langstaff, Creator of the Christmas Revels. I read this solely because Susan Cooper wrote it, as I’d never heard of the Christmas Revels, although now that I’ve read this book I’d love to attend one. Revels differ from other performances in that they have a strong participatory element: the audience sings along with many of the songs and joins the dance at the end. Alas, the Revels seem to be mostly a coastal phenomenon: they started in Boston and spread to New York, California, Portland… Some of these locations have spring and autumn revels, too.

Cooper fans may be interested to learn that it was Jack Langstaff’s encouragement that propelled King of Shadows from a mere idea to a finished book. In fact, he gave her a copy of John Bennett’s Master Skylark, so there is a direct connection between these two “boy meets Shakespeare” books!

What I’m Reading Now

Charlotte Bronte has just left the Heger pensionnat in Brussels and returned to Yorkshire for good. Elizabeth Gaskell doesn’t mention her unrequited love for M. Heger, and neither, interestingly, does Mr. Shorter, who annotated the 1900 edition. Since all the principals were dead at that point (not only Charlotte herself but her father, her husband, the Hegers, etc) one might imagine he would feel more freedom to talk about it, but apparently not.

What I Plan to Read Next

I was planning to read Penelope Lively’s Astercote and The Ghost of Thomas Kempe, which are also supposed to be timeslip, but now I feel suspicious as to the actual amount of timeslip they contain. Has anyone read them? Do the characters from the past and present actually meet?

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Gary Paulsen’s Guts: The True Stories Behind Hatchet and the Brian Books, in which Paulsen details the various wilderness experiences that shaped Hatchet. Everything in the book is either something that happened to him (like getting stomped by an angry moose) or something that he tried to make sure it would work - like spending four hours striking flint rocks in a cave wall with a steel hatchet to make sure that you could actually start a fire from the resulting sparks.

The one thing he simply couldn’t do is eat a raw turtle egg. As Paulsen notes, Brian was starving when he managed it, and maybe Paulsen could have done it too if he had been hungry enough, but as a well-fed man training his sled dogs for the Iditarod, no.

I also finished Stella Gibbons’ Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm, a collection of short stories, only two of which are Christmas-related. I was a bit disappointed at first to realize it’s not a Christmas collection, but once I recovered from my pique I enjoyed myself for the most part. The story where a charmingly eccentric woman accidentally destroys the happy life she’s carefully built by trying to do a kind deed will haunt me, though.

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve begun Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Bronte. More specifically, I’ve begun a 1900 reprint of the third edition, where Gaskell removed sundry items, such as the assertion that Patrick Bronte had cut up one of his wife’s silk dresses and sawn the backs off of chairs. (Presumably chair backs are inimical to giving one’s offspring a suitably spartan upbringing?) But I know where they were, because the edition has footnotes by Clement K. Shorter, which mention these charges specifically in order to refute them, thus inadvertently renewing these charges once again.

Ever since this book was published, there has been controversy over whether Gaskell overstated the miseries of the Brontes’ lives, so I was amused to find this letter from Charlotte’s friend Mary Taylor in the introduction. “Though not so gloomy as the truth,” Taylor wrote to Gaskell, “it [that is, the biography] is perhaps as much so as people will accept without calling it exaggerated, and feeling the desire to doubt and contradict it.”

Apparently there is a third position, which is that Gaskell actually understated matters!

What I Plan to Read Next

Does anyone have any recs for nonfiction books about the French Revolution?

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s Gib and the Gray Ghost, sequel to Gib Rides Home, which like many sequels was not quite as good as the first one. In particular I felt she bobbled the ending. But lots of good horse material if you like horse books.

Also John le Carré’s The Honourable Schoolboy, which took me forever to read - not as pacy as many of his other novels. It doesn’t help that this one often slips into a weirdly retrospective style, as in, “Afterwards people said Smiley should have done X, but given the information at the time it’s hard to see how he could have realized…” This could be used to heighten tension, but here I felt the style leached it away.

Also Ethel Cook Eliot’s Ariel Dances. Nineteen-year-old Ariel is the daughter of Gregory Clare, an unknown artist who recently died. His youthful friend Hugh has taken on the responsibility of selling Clare’s canvases, which will, of course, make Ariel’s fortune, but until then Ariel will be staying with Hugh’s family, where she is more or less adopted by Hugh’s semi-mystical grandmother, whom Eliot compares to great-great-grandmother in George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin

Are Ariel and Hugh going to get married? 100%. Is this how the book ends? 100% not. In fact, we end with Hugh’s semi-mystical grandmother triumphantly shuffling off this mortal coil to her next great adventure, Death.

Ethel Cook Eliot is one of those authors where I’m sometimes a bit puzzled why I keep going back to her, and I think part of it is that her writing priorities are often interestingly bizarre, in a way that it didn’t quite come into focus for me until she brought in the George MacDonald comparison. Christian mysticism! But with magic! Except no actual magic in this particular book, but still kind of magic?

What I’m Reading Now

Galloping toward the end of Villette! Lucy has just been accidentally-on-purpose directed to the house where M. Paul pays room and board for his old tutor, his dead fiancee’s mean grandmother, and an old family servant, on the theory that upon seeing how many dependents he’s already supporting Lucy will realize that M. Paul is WAY too broke to marry.

Unfortunately for everyone involved in this plot, what Lucy has in fact realized is “M. Paul is an amazing human being despite also being the most irritating person on earth” and also “People think? that M. Paul wants to marry me? enough that they are actually going out of their way to dissuade me from considering it???? I mean I’m still NOT considering it, that would be PRESUMPTUOUS, if you allow yourself to want anything then fate will strike you down! But still…”

What I Plan to Read Next

Taking a little break from Smiley right now, but will swing back around with Smiley’s People in 2025.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Cannot BELIEVE I waited all these years to read Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s Gib Rides Home. The book is loosely inspired by Snyder’s own father’s childhood, and features a Dickensian orphanage! horsies! a horseless carriage! a lonely child finding a home! and just in general is a fantastic homage, as the character of Gib is loveable and memorable and recognizably a child while also being clearly the kind of child who would grow up into the calm, steadfast, loving father Snyder describes in the afterword.

What I’m Reading Now

I had good intentions of traipsing slowly through Charlotte Bronte’s Villette so we could all savor it together, but alas, I’ve been unable to restrain myself, and have galloped through the first few chapters. Alone in the world, with but a little money in her pocket and an even more meager stock of French, Lucy decides to set forth across the Channel to seek her fortunes on the continent. On the crossing, she meets Ginevra Fanshawe, a pretty flibbertigibbet who is headed to a pensionnat in Villette (capital city of Labassecour, for which read Belgium), and for no better reason goes to Villette herself, and soon finds herself ensconced as an English teacher in the self-same pensionnat.

Selfish, boastful, vain, but a saving open straightforwardness in her desire to be admired, Ginevra is one of the delights of the book.

Notwithstanding these foibles, and various others needless to mention—but by no means of a refined or elevating character—how pretty she was! How charming she looked, when she came down on a sunny Sunday morning, well-dressed and well-humoured, robed in pale lilac silk, and with her fair long curls reposing on her white shoulders.

What I Plan to Read Next

Obviously Gib and the Gray Ghost, the sequel to Gib Rides Home. These came out during the PEAK of my Zilpha Keatley Snyder obsession, so I’m truly baffled that I didn’t read them at the time.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I’m still trundling along with the 2024 Newbery winners. This week, I read Nasuġraq Rainey Hopson’s Eagle Drums, a retelling of an Inupiaq legend about a boy who is kidnapped by eagles who can shift into human form, because they want to teach him to… Well, I don’t want to spoil the surprise, because part of the pleasure of the book comes from figuring out just what the eagles DO want. I enjoyed all the details about traditional life in arctic, and also that feeling you really only get from old legends and retellings thereof that this story is built on axioms about how the world works that are vastly different than the ones structuring most modern fiction.

Gary Paulsen’s The Quilt, another short memoir about a visit to his grandmother as a child. This time, he’s about six, and he goes to visit his grandmother and they go to stay with a neighbor who is about to have a baby… and while they wait, all the neighboring women come over (the men are all away for World War II) and get out a memory quilt that they’ve made, a patch for every member of their little community who has died over the past few decades.

Moving. And I think the book explains something about Paulsen's fiction, which is that although his main theme is masculinity, he doesn't have the that obnoxious male chauvinist attitude that so many writers do who are writing about Manly Men Being Manly. He respects women, and this is not merely an attitude he parrots but a thing that he knows in his bones from his childhood and his time with his grandmother.

What I’m Reading Now

Still traipsing along in Shirley. We have now moved into the POV of Martin Yorke, an obnoxious young lad who has become the go-between for Caroline and Robert Moore now that Robert is sorely injured and convalescing in the Yorke’s house. NO SHIRLEY for pages and pages! Woe.

What I Plan to Read Next

Erin Bow’s Simon Sort of Says, the last of the 2024 Newbery winners.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Vivien Alcock’s The Haunting of Cassie Palmer. Cassie is the seventh child of a seventh child, and her medium mother expects great things of her, much to Cassie’s horror. But when Cassie discovers that her mother is a fake (or at least occasionally fakes her seances), she decides in a burst of relief to go to the cemetery to test her own supposed gifts and prove them fake too, once and for all. But instead she raises a ghost! Oops. An eerie and unusual ghost, as one would expect of Alcock, although I didn’t think this was one of her best.

Similarly, The Looking Glass War is perhaps not one of John Le Carré’s best, although possibly I did it no favors reading it so soon after The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. I went into it with the attitude “What fuckery is the Circus up to now?” and was therefore unsurprised when the Circus was indeed up to fuckery, although I was a bit surprised ( spoilers )

What I’m Reading Now

You may be interested to learn that we have a brief continuation of Jane Eyre’s fairy theme in Shirley. After Robert Moore fails to take his leave of Shirley and Caroline at a fete, Shirley impetuous drags Caroline down a shortcut to cut him off on his way home. “Where did you come from?” Moore demands. “Are you fairies? I left two like you, one in purple, one in white, standing on the top of a bank, four fields off, but a minute ago.”

What I Plan to Read Next

Last week I posted about reading Gerald Durrell’s The Fantastic Flying Adventure, and littlerhymes piped up that she’d loved that book and the sequel. “THE SEQUEL???” I screamed. Of course I had to request The Fantastic Dinosaur Adventure through ILL.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

A week of mildly disappointing reading. First, Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s The Ghosts of Rathburn Park, which is entertaining enough but doesn't really come together. There’s a big creepy house that we don’t spend nearly enough time exploring, a swamp that we cross but don’t explore at all, and a burnt-out church with a hut inside that gets a little bit of exploration but, again, not nearly enough. Also one of the ghosts is definitely not a ghost and the other ghost is only maybe a ghost, and I just feel that the ghost quotient in a book called The Ghosts of Rathburn Park should be higher.

Second, one of this year’s Newbery Honor books, Daniel Nayeri’s The Many Assassinations of Samir, the Seller of Dreams. The Silk Road setting was fun, but unfortunately the book didn’t sell me on the idea that anyone would want to assassinate Samir, let alone want him assassinated so badly that they would hire half a dozen murderers of various nationalities simultaneously in order to give it a try. What a waste of capital, you know? At least wait for one to fail before you outlay the cash for another!

And finally (please don’t throw rocks at me), P. G. Wodehouse’s Mike and Psmith. I’ve been really enjoying the Jeeves and Wooster email readalong so I thought I’d give Psmith another go, and I do enjoy Psmith himself (in a “but I can see why people would like to slightly strange you” kind of way), but not the Mike and Psmith books as a whole. Maybe the problem is Mike? Sorry Mike. You just care about cricket too much, kid.

What I’m Reading Now

Houston, we have a Shirley! I don’t remember a whole lot about this book, but I did remember almost word for word the bit where Shirley Keeldar first meets Caroline Helstone and instantly - before even speaking to her - presents her with a nosegay, and “put her hands behind her, and stood bending slightly towards her guest, still regarding [Caroline], in the attitude and with something of the aspect of a grave but gallant little cavalier.”

What I Plan to Read Next

Traipsing onward through the Newbery books of 2024! I’d really like to read Mexikid next, and… it looks like it’s actually been turned back in, finally, after being checked out for about two months! So maybe indeed that will be next.

I don't believe I've ever before arranged a reread around following a specific thread through a narrative, but following the fairies through Jane Eyre proved a rich vein right up till the end. When Jane returns to Rochester, she finds him blind and crippled, maimed attempting to save his mad wife from the fire she set, the fire which claimed her life. But he recognizes the sound of her voice, the touch of her small fingers, the curve of her slender waist: "my fairy," he calls her, and then demands, "You are altogether a human being, Jane? You are certain of that?"

“I conscientiously believe so, Mr. Rochester,” Jane assures him.

But he can't be fooled by this pretense of demure humanity. "You mocking changeling — fairy-born and human-bred!"

This is, I think, the first time that he hits upon the word changeling. Now at last he fully understands her true nature, and that is why at last they can be reconciled and wed. (Well, and also the fact that his first wife is now conveniently dead.)

Leaving aside the fairy theme, this is still true: he recognizes, he bows to the fact that Jane's conscience is a part of her, and that in trying to bully or bribe it aside after the revelation that he was already married, he was wrong, and trying to turn her into something she's not, so as to keep her with him. Now he truly knows her, and his love for her is, likewise, true.

(Hence also the unworthiness of St. John, who saw only half of Jane's soul, and could never have loved her impish mocking side; in fact tries to stamp out the sparks of it whenever they happen to blaze clear.)

This is a theme that will recur in Villette: the one who loves you is the one who knows you, who sees past surface appearances to the burning soul beneath. Jane Eyre and Lucy Snowe are not much alike in other ways, but they are similar in that a cool English reserve masks an inner volcano.

First, however, Shirley. And first of all in Shirley, I have to get past the endless prelude with the world's most boring curates. But the path will lead in the end to Shirley herself: to that thought I must cling strong!