Lucasta Miller on Patrick Brontë

The recent discovery of a new letter written by Patrick Brontë few days after the death of Charlotte Brontë is the reason behind this article written by Lucasta Miller, the author of The Brontë Myth, and published in The Guardian.

Remember that you can read a complete transcript of the letter, kindly provided by the staff of the Lambeth Library, in this post of ours. You can also see a scan in this other post. More reactions and comments can be found here and here.

Last week, the Times published a story on its news pages about the discovery in Lambeth Palace's archive of a letter by the Rev Patrick Brontë, written soon after the death of his daughter Charlotte. The document, it was said, will transform his image, as it shows the Victorian patriarch to have been a good egg after all, not a monstrous bully as had previously been thought. (...)

More interesting, perhaps, than the letter itself, and its conventionalities, is the fact that it seems newsworthy that he experienced normal emotions. The negative image of him, originally created by Charlotte Brontë's first biographer, Elizabeth Gaskell, in 1857 still prevails. Gaskell derived her account primarily from unsubstantiated gossip, particularly the suspect testimony of a vengeful servant who had been dismissed from the Brontë household. The original edition of her Life of Charlotte Brontë was full of lurid, melodramatic stories of Patrick's near-crazy domestic violence: it had him addicted to acts of destruction such as sawing up furniture in a fit, and it suggested that he destroyed his children's health by keeping them on a meat-free starvation diet (this last is disproved by one of Emily's diary fragments, which refers to a hearty carnivorous dinner).

After publication, Patrick Brontë, who remained remarkably courteous considering, simply required Gaskell to remove her false allegations from the second edition, which she did. But once they had entered the public domain, he became enshrined in the popular imagination as a cruel and terrorising parent. Despite the early retraction, the stories kept appearing in biographies of the Brontë sisters well into the 20th century, and even after they had been repeatedly questioned, the image they had been used to construct remained.

Gaskell's need to believe the worst of Patrick was conditioned by the public relations exercise she was passionately engaged in both on behalf of Charlotte Brontë and, implicitly, on behalf of the woman writer in general. At the time she died, Charlotte's books were regarded as unladylike, coarse, even immoral and "anti-Christian". Her heroines had too much ego, her vocabulary was not always delicate, and she was prepared to explore female sexuality in print in a way that no "authoress" apart from the scandalous Frenchwoman George Sand had done before.

Even Gaskell, who specialised in writing philanthropic Christian novels, thought there was something dodgy about Charlotte's writings. But she pityingly regarded this as a pathology: the unfortunate by-product of a miserable upbringing in an isolated and uncivilised environment. She could not bring herself wholly to defend the artistic products of what she saw as Charlotte's damaged imagination; instead she decided to rescue her reputation by presenting her life as that of a blameless martyr to domestic suffering. To do so, she suppressed, for example, her knowledge of Charlotte's illicit obsession with a married man.

It was as part of this strategy to purify and feminise Charlotte, and to explain away anything "morbid" in her novels, that she needed to demonise Patrick as a father who had failed his children. Some of the evidence she herself collected contradicted her own view, particularly her quotations from the Brontë's early writings, which revealed them to have been children with a huge capacity for fun and liveliness, whose father bought them exciting toys. Yet the image of childhood deprivation she created was more powerful than the facts she documented.

Gaskell's damning portrayal of the Brontës' father has survived, despite numerous biographers devoting much time and energy to rescuing him from his posthumous fate. Most recent of these is Juliet Barker, whose search through such sources as local newspapers revealed that, far from being a weird misanthrope living in morbid isolation, he had been active and respected in public affairs.

The story of Patrick Brontë's unfortunate afterlife shows what extraordinary power biographers can exert, particularly over the supporting characters in a famous subject's life, who tend to be presented with less nuance than the main protagonist. Yet it also reveals the dangers of literary biographers relying too much on their preconceptions and behaving as judge and jury over the moral character of the human beings whose lives they are in the business of recreating. Emotional truths about, say, what makes a good parent-child relationship are not susceptible to the same standards of forensic proof as dates of birth or places of death. Biographers should be trying to understand the complex-ities of subjective experience rather than arrogantly handing down a guilty or not guilty verdict.

Categories: In the News, Brontëana, Patrick Brontë