Charlotte Bronte

The three Bronte sisters-Anne, Charlotte, and Emily-collectively known often as

the "stormy sisterhood.They poured their inner life into the mould of the novel. This
consideration leads Hugh Walker to assert: "The Brontes belong to that class of writers
whom it is impossible to understand except through the medium of biography." But too
much of preoccupation with biography should not be allowed to lead us to a lopsided
appreciation of their novels. Thus Samuel C. Chew observes : "The three Bronte sisters
have been overlaid with so much biography, criticism, and conjecture that in reading
about them there is danger lest their own books be left unread."
Charlotte Bronte wrote the following four novels:
(i)

The Professor
(ii)

(iii)
(iv)

VUlette
Jane Eyre
Shirley

The first two novels were based on her personal experiences at a Brussels
boarding-house where she most probably fell in love with the Belgian scholar Heger who
perfectly answered her conception of a dashing hero of the Byronic type. Her soul had
always yearned for such a Lochinvar, but she being the daughter of a village parson, the
men who made proposals to her actually were lacklustre curates with one of whom she
ultimately settled down in 1854-a year before her death. But she worshipped a dashing,
splendid, masculine figure as Heger was. Her frustrated passion for him provides the
groundwork of her first two novels. The heroine of her third novel is a governess, just
like her sister Anne. Her tempestuous love-affair with Rochester-a combination of
wonderful nobility and meanness is the staple of this novel. In Shirley, to quote Legouis,
"she set a story of intimate emotion against a background of Yorkshire in the time of the
industrial disturbances." Perhaps the elemental and unchastened presence of the
Yorkshire moor among which the Brontes lived is to some extent responsible for the
fierce passions and elemental emotions which are characteristic of their works.
Charlotte Bronte in her novels revolted against the traditions of Jane Austen,
Dickens, and Thackeray. Thackeray's Vanity Fair she praised in glowing terms, but she
herself never attempted anything of the kind. Her novels are novels not of manners but
of passions and the naked soul. Her characters-mostly the effusions of her own soul-are
elemental figures acting in the backdrop of elemental nature. The social paraphernalia is
altogether dispensed with. "Gone", says David Cecil, "is the busy prosaic urban world
with its complicated structure and its trivial motives, silenced the accents'of everyday
chatter, vanished are newspapers, fashions, business houses, duchesses, footmen, and
snobs. Instead the gale rages under the elemental sky, while indoors, their faces rugged
in the fierce firelight, austere figures of no clearly defined class or period declare eternal
love and hate to one another in phrases of stilted eloquence and staggering candour."
According to Compton-Rickett three characteristics "detach themselves from the
writings of Charlotte Bronte." They are:
(i)

the note of intimacy;

(ii)

the note of passion; and

(iii)

the note of revolt.

The note of intimacy is caused by the markedly autobiographic slant of her

novels. The note of passion is struck by a lonely sensitive woman on behalf of another
woman. Her point of view is specifically the point of view of a woman. Like Mrs.
Browning she effectually represents in her life and novels the pangs of a forlorn woman
whose Prince Charming is yet to come. She pictures and highlights the primeval woman
A s regards the note of revolt, we must point out that she was a rebel by nature and a
Puritan by training. She could not reconcile these two elements. "Charlotte", says
Compton-Rickett, "had the soul of a primitive woman, leashed in by a few early
Victorian conventions, and she is always straining against the leash while upbraiding at
herself for doing so." Though she did not'fujly, or even appreciably, revolt against social
conventions, she at least revolted against the prevailing conventions of the novel.