The new year has arrived, and we now enter the twelfth year of my Anne Brontë, and Brontë family, blog. Thank you again for all the great comments over the last few weeks, I’m always happy to read them, and I have big plans for this blog over the coming year. Today we are going to look at the man at the centre of a monumental event in the Brontë story on this day in 1844.
How has your new year started? Are you easing your way in slowly but surely, or maybe getting ready for a return to work tomorrow (my commiserations)? In 1846 Emily Brontë opened the year in dramatic fashion, as on the 2nd of January she penned what many see as her poetic masterpiece: “No Coward Soul Is Mine”. Here is Emily’s manuscript version of the poem, and she’s helpfully dated it for us:
The start of the year 1844 saw a dramatic turn in events for Charlotte Brontë, for it was on 1st January of that year that she set sail and ended her near two year stint at the Pensionnat Heger school in Brussels (first as a pupil and then as a teacher). The Heger family can be seen at the head of this post. Charlotte arrived back in Haworth on 3rd January, and would never see Belgium again.
Charlotte returned with a heavy heart, but for me it’s quite clear that her unrequited love for Monsieur Constantin Heger heavily influenced the novels she would soon write. It’s clear that Heger was a complex man – he could be a stern man, but did he treat Charlotte Brontë badly, did he trifle with her affections, or was he simply the unwilling target of a student then colleague’s affections? The truth is we will never know, but we get a glimpse of him in an account given to the Carluke and Lanark Gazette on 16th January 1915. In it, a Mrs O’ Brien, looking back at her life, recalls a friend with a Brontë connection and who had her own time at the Pensionnat Heger some years after Charlotte Brontë had left. I reproduce it below:
‘Mrs. O’Brien writes: Only the other day a French friend was telling me that her whole life was influenced by Charlotte Brontë. This friend was not born when Charlotte Brontë lived, and I was puzzled to find the connecting-link between them. My friend explained to me that when she left the French convent where she was educated she found a situation in a Belgian school. She was getting on happily when an English girl who was discontented with her surroundings told her that she shared Charlotte Brontë’s opinions of the Belgians. Charlotte Brontë! The name had not penetrated the French convent school library. The English girl was indignant. “You never heard of Charlotte Brontë! You don’t know that she lived here in this very place, and suffered as I am suffering.”
It was the famous school which Charlotte described in Villette, and when she had read it she was intensely miserable. In those days, Mme. Heger was still ruling, and her husband, when questioned as to his famous pupil, replied with insufferable vanity that he had liked his English eleve [tr: ‘pupil’], and she had responded with a warmer feeling. The tone of the reply disgusted my friend, both with the speaker and with her surroundings. Her heart ached at the thought of what Charlotte Brontë had suffered in that place, at the hands of those people, who had prospered and done well. The feeling grew so acute that it seemed to her the place was haunted. She decided to leave it and accept a worse situation where her mind was at peace.”
I hope you all enjoyed that almost first hand account of Monsieur Heger, and that you are also at peace even in the midst of January – surely the longest month in the year, but lighter and longer days are coming. I also hope you can join me again next Sunday for another new Brontë blog post.
It’s not really surprising that Charlotte showed comparatively little sympathy with Branwell over his love for Mrs Lydia Robinson. Apart from possibly confiding in both of her sisters, Charlotte was forced to conceal her feelings for Monsieur Heger – feelings that seem obvious from her letters to him.
I wonder how much, if anything, Arthur Bell Nicholls ever knew about this period in Charlotte’s life, and what his feelings were?
Emily disliked Monsieur Heger, so I doubt whether Charlotte could speak very praisingly or freely of him, but I believe Emily knew her sister’s feelings. She writes in a diary that she wished everyone else was as content as she, referring I suppose to both Branwell and Charlotte.There is a sentence in Nelly Dean’s narration, when Linton has had a fight with Catherine but still hesitated leaving her, where she says that he had the power to depart as much as a cat the power to leave a mouse half killed, or a bird half eaten. It always reminds of Charlotte for some reason, the half pity, half scorn of that line.
I doubt Arthur knew much about her previous life other than what he had read in her books. They lived too short a time together and she wisely wouldn’t support her marriage by referring to old flames. But I think he must have known that she was not deeply in love with him at the beginning, but he had the belief he could make her happy, and I think he did. If only they were luckier and Charlotte had never been pregnant!
No coward soul is mine, is my favourite of Emily’s.