In the Guardian, an interesting article on Charlotte Brontë...

Charlotte Brontë's romantic obsession...

Charlotte Brontë, c1840. Photograph: Archive Photos

by Claire Harman Saturday 24 October 2015   

In 1913, a Belgian doctor and scientist called Paul Heger and his sister Louise donated to the British Library four letters that the novelist Charlotte Brontë had written to their late father, Constantin, in 1844 and 1845, when Constantin was a well-known figure in Brussels and a teacher at the girls’ school owned and run by his wife Zoe. 

Charlotte and Emily Brontë had been pupils at the Pensionnat Heger in 1842, and Charlotte returned there as a pupil-teacher the following year.

Her deep admiration for her former master was no secret – Elizabeth Gaskell had written about it and Heger’s influence over Charlotte’s development as a writer in her bestselling Life of Charlotte Brontë in 1857 – but what Gaskell suppressed and what the Heger family’s letters made painfully clear was that Brontë’s feelings had gone far beyond ordinary admiration or gratitude. 

They expressed an intimacy that Brontë expected would deepen and grow after she returned home to Yorkshire, then a rising irritation as Heger fobbed her off with cooling, formal replies, and finally an angry despair at his strategic silence: “when day after day I await a letter”, she wrote to him in November 1845, “and day after day disappointment flings me down again into overwhelming misery, when the sweet delight of seeing your writing and reading your counsel flees from me like an empty vision – then I am in a fever – I lose my appetite and my sleep– I pine away.”

Louise Heger had been wondering what to do with these explosive documents ever since her mother’s death in 1890, when she inherited the jewel box they had been stored in. 

Her mother had explained Miss Brontë’s heated feelings as a crush that had gone too far, insisting that her husband had done nothing wrong. 

Constantin, she related, had tried to discourage the agitated ex-pupil and tore up the letters after reading them, whereupon his more prudent wife surreptitiously retrieved the pieces from the wastebin, reassembled them with gummed paper and thread, and stored them in her jewel box, against a day when she might be called on to defend the conduct of her husband and the reputation of her school.

Madame’s caution was understandable: Brontë was a poor, plain 25-year-old Englishwoman when they first knew her, but shot to fame with Jane Eyre three years after leaving the pensionnat. 

She published under an androgynous pseudonym, “Currer Bell”. 

However, the secret of her identity was not kept very strictly after 1849 and people in the know read her heavily autobiographical novels as confessional puzzles.

When the second edition of Jane Eyre appeared with a dedication to Thackeray (whose wife had been declared insane a few years earlier), there was mortifying speculation as to whether the author had been his governess or mistress, and when Shirley was published in 1849, the Brontës’ neighbours seemed as interested in finding real-life counterparts to the families depicted in it as in reading the book itself.

The publication of Gaskell’s bestselling biography just two years after Brontë’s death in 1855 at last revealed the author’s name and sex to the public, and told the riveting story of her struggle, with her sisters Emily and Anne, to become a writer, the siblings’ isolated lives in their remote Yorkshire home and their tragic early deaths. 

The burgeoning cult of “the Brontës” raised the stakes of the guessing game about how closely their novels reflected life, leading to a bizarre situation when the owners of the school in Lancashire that the girls had attended became so annoyed about its identification with spartan Lowood in Jane Eyre that they threatened legal action for defamation – against a novel.

When Gaskell had asked Brontë about fact and fiction in the novels, she got some unexpected answers. Brontë was evasive about whether she had based the opium trance in Villette on personal experience (in an age when opium was readily available and often used), but when asked about the mystical episode in Jane Eyre of Rochester “calling” to Jane across hundreds of miles, she insisted that it was true, “it really happened”. 

Strangely, a letter exists, written in the 1880s, from Constantin to another ex-pupil, Meta Mossman, that might shed some light on this claim, in which he suggests that he and Mossman could keep in touch using just such a form of emotional telepathy as Rochester extends to Jane, “communication between two distant hearts, instantaneous, without paper, without pen, or words, or messenger”. 

Whether Constantin suggested something like this to Brontë many years earlier (leading her to think a telepathic connection “really happened”), or whether he was responding to her world-famous novel is impossible to tell; the byplay between art and life is too intermeshed.

Brontë’s first, unpublished, novel, The Master (written between 1844 and 1846 and published posthumously as The Professor), had used her Brussels experience as the setting for a love story between a British teacher and his Anglo-Swiss pupil, but there was nothing in it that would have unduly disturbed the Hegers, had they been able to read it.

She was far more explicit when she returned to the same material in Villette, which was set in a Belgian pensionnat almost identical to the Hegers’s, with a hero (a thinly veiled version of Constantin) kept from his English love, Lucy, by a scheming headmistress (a thinly veiled version of his wife).

 Details of the school building, the garden, the city, plays and concerts she had attended, down to the very same programmes of music, were reproduced in the novel with documentary thoroughness. 

It was like a gauntlet thrown down. Constantin had refused to answer her letters in 1844-45, even after she begged him for any response, “To forbid me to write to you, to refuse to reply to me – that will be to tear from me the only joy I have on earth – to deprive me of my last remaining privilege”. 

Now Brontë was free to say what she liked, to mix fact and fantasy and be as explicit or as unfair as she wanted, behind the mask of fiction. 

One family friend of the Hegers felt that, by exposing such depth of feeling, Villette was indeed “truer than the biography”.MH Spielmann, the critic who helped the Heger family negotiate with the British Library in 1913 and who wrote about the letters in the Times on their publication, had heard a story that when Brontë left Belgium in 1844, her last words to Zoe Heger were “Je me vengerai!”. Spielmann thought it recalled vividly “that wonderful parting scene in Villette”, where Paul Emanuel turns on Madame Beck and commands her to leave him alone with Lucy. 

But just as the scene in the novel is clearly a prime piece of wish-fulfilment, one cannot imagine Brontë uttering such unvarnished words as “I will be revenged!” to her recent employer and protectoress. Besides, her turbulent feelings would have been all too clear to Madame; there would have been no need to say anything at all.But by the early 1850s, when she wrote Villette, Brontë did perhaps want revenge as much as, or even more than, communication. 

Although she tried to prevent the novel being translated into French, she must have known it would become available in Brussels, and Madame Heger did indeed own a pirated copy. 

What she felt on reading Brontë’s forensic dissection of her character, family, home and school is not recorded. 

The Hegers had forfeited the right either to object, or praise.

• Claire Harman’s Charlotte Brontë: A Life is published by Viking.