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Bronte Sisters

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Interview fabricated by Simone Grone-Sackett

Illiterate recently took the opportunity to speak with three of literature's best known authors, originally published as Acton, Ellis and Curer Bell. You guessed it, the Bronte sisters. After a few sips of drawingboard Sherry, they opened up about their life, their death and their feelings about each other. This shit is fo' real - for your reading pleasure.

As you know, our theme this issue is love to hate/hate to love. I imagine there you all feel the whole spectrum of emotion about each other. Give me the dirt.

Charlotte: this is a topic I feel ill at ease discussing. Tis no good to speak ill of the dead.
Anne: As Heaven knows, we are all dead Charlotte. I am quite content to expound upon the wrongs done me by my sister Charlotte. From the earliest age, she cast a long shadow upon us all. We were very close-knit as children (having no other society to speak of but the dead, for the town cemetary was our only neighbor), but as adults Charlotte dominated our literary careers, writing ill of my talents in the introduction to one of my texts. She believes Emily and I were prudish, melancholy and mousey, when in fact our nature is only of a serious bent.
Emily: And for my part, my "literary career" was launched against my will by my eldest sister when she found private poems I had written and forced me to publish them, although I was wont to keep them to myself. And she lent me no support when my one novel, Wuthering Heights, was not received well by critics or the public. I never wrote again after that.
CH: I have no ill will for my sisters, and their low opinion of me is hardly deserved. It is my brother Branwell that burns heavy in my own heart. As a youth he was widely held to be the most talented among us, able to write verse and passage, possessing a keen intellect and an above average ability to render portraits. His portrait of us three is one of few known to exist. Unfortunately he squandered his talents on spirits and laudenum, and when sent out into the world was unable to maintain a position for more than a year at once. He worked as a portrait painter, railway station attendant and tutor. We all harboured high hopes that he would reach success at this last endeavor, but he was sent home in disgrace after only six months of employment with a respectable family after having been discovered in a licentious affair with the wife of his employer. When he returned to our home in Haworth he was delirious and morose, and suffered delirium tremens as a result of his overindulgence in forbidden substances, by which I mean that in the last months of his life he was beset by imaginary insects crawling upon his skin, and was unable to recognize us or his surroundings. Emily, the tallest and strongest of us sisters, was forced to carry him about in his final days, something that I fear deeply disturbed her.
EM: Yes indeed it did. Being the mule of my drug-adled dying brother was not my idea of a picnic upon the moor. Perhaps that was what in part lead to my own demise a few short months later. That or the bloody bile he coughed up onto me repeatedly in the terminal stages of tuburculosis, which I then myself contracted and gave to Anne. Indeed, I also feel great resentment against my brother.
AN: it is not for me to judge. Our Heavenly Father will set all things right.

Have any of you ever been in love? Prove it.

CH: I know Emily and Anne haven\'t been in love, unless with each other. It is hardly possible to be in love if one\'s only social exposure is to one's own family.
AN: That is unfair, Charlotte. In the five years I worked as governess outside of the home I was exposed to many eligible men. It just seemed that they were all of a lowly moral character, unfit for my high standards.
EM: Charlotte has been in love often enough. We call her Charlotte the Harlot in jest. (snickering from Emily and Anne)
CH: Hardly in jest! But yes, I was in love once, and I married him when I was 34. As a young chit I had consigned myself to spinsterhood, only to find love much later in life. Unfortunately I found myself with child only a year after our union. The pregnancy caused incessant vomiting, of which I died. Tis a sad way to go.
EM: You were in love another time as well, with Monsieur Constatin Heger in Belgium, your instructor in foreign languages. Madame Heger certainly did not approve of your love lusts, however.
CH: That is unfair! Monsieur Heger and I were but the closest of friends!
EM: And what of your publisher, George Smith, who has your junior by almost a decade!
AN: There were many other men who were in love with Charlotte, she was quite popular with curate types. Let's see, in one year alone she turned down two proposals from men of the cloth. I always fancied that firey Irishman, but he had eyes only for you, Charlotte.
CH: And what about you, Emily, where did the character of Heathcliff come from? His passions could hardly have been invented. It is said that you were an admirer from afar of Jack Sharp, the town ruffian in Halifax were you tried your hand at teaching, to no avail, because you missed dear papa beyond all natural bounds.
EM: that was nothing! My heart is pure.
AN: As is mine.

Charlotte, you lost all three of your living siblings in a period of seven months. Let\'s talk about that.

CH:It was trying, to be sure. I succumbed to a deep depression and was taken ill for many months. Brother Branwell passed away in September of 48 (1848, that is), then Emily three months later, followed closely by Anne in March of 49. It did not shock me that once Emily was deceased, Anne would follow closely behind, for they were always thick as thieves. I have heard it said that the sanitation in Haworth was truly beyond all measure of uncouthness - the average lifespan of the township was but 25.8 years. My father, Mr. Bronte, was an amateur physician and practiced his arts on our family. He was not very successful, for at the age of 33 I was the last remaining Bronte of six children. Perhaps he was mistaken in forcing us all to sleep with our heads pointing North to hold consumption at bay, for most of my siblings died of precisely that. Had we slept with our heads facing South, my story might be a happier one.

Some scholars have speculated that you were all three in love with the same man, Mr. Arthur Bell Nicholls, your father's apprentice curate whom Charlotte eventually married. What do you have to say about that?

EM: stuff and rubbish! I was never in love with any man, my heart was saved for Jesus.
AN: Nor I. And besides, Mr. Nicholls was never handsome enough to tempt me, although he was a good soul of a decent family. I never understood our father\'s initial refusal of consent in his marriage to Charlotte, for the two men were good friends and shared many turns of character, including a love of knowledge and a kind heart.
CH: I can attest that Arthur had eyes only for me. We wrote letters often in which he confessed his passionate attachment to me and only me. I am no fool- had it been otherwise I would not have consented to give him my hand.

Some scholars even speculate that the insanely high death rate of the Brontes is no accident. Did Charlotte and her husband poison anyone?

EM: Stuff and rubbish again, I say! We both died of tuberculosis, known at the time as consumption, a disease affecting many delicate and refined ladies in England at the time. And besides, why would they want to see us both come to an untimely end? We were not in the way of any inheritance, the Brontes have never been well to do. Nor were we a threat to them in any other way. This speculation is merely the chatter of rumormongers who seek ill intentions at every turn.
CH:Thank you Emily, for defending my honor. It brings joy to my heart that you know I would never do anything to harm you.
EM: that\'s not what I said, Charlotte. I said you didn't intend to kill me. Your support of me as an authoress is another matter entirely.
AN: girls, let us be sensible and not squabble in front of the lady.

Mr. Bronte (your father) was a very DIY kind of guy. He tutored you and he acted as your doctor, yet as father he seems largely absent. Why is this, and how did it affect each of you?

CH: Our father did the best he could by us. We lost our dear mother Maria Branwell when we were all quite young, and I believe our father was quite overwhelmed by the brood. You see, there were six little Brontes to begin with. Our two eldest sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, died at the Clergy Daughters\' School at Cowan Bridge, a truly cold and friendless institution where nutrition of body and spirit was ignored in favor of strict limitations and harsh conditions. It was repugant. I portray conditions there in the first part of Jane Eyre, the novel that launched me to fame. We were all sent to this school by our father but he righted his mistake after the eldest two died and removed the three of us. He then undertook the care of our educations entirely upon himself and did what he could for us and our prospects.
AN: While we were cared for bodily, I believe that spiritually we were left to starve, and were driven to find solace amongst each other. Nothing can replace the bonds of parental love, and each of us remained impressed by that dearth. Tellingly, all of us write of orphaned childhoods, even Charlotte, although we were not technically orphans. Had our mother survived childbearing we might have turned into quite different writers, full of cheer and requited love.
EM: I differ from my sisters in this matter. My father was my closest companion, held his house and his bosom open to me during my three decades on earth. He never ceased disseminating his knowledge to me, and taught me widely in the fields of literature poetry and philosophy. He could not have done more to make me happy.

Charlotte, the Bronte Society claims that your ghost haunts the locale of the Jane Eyre manuscript, whatever museum it might be housed in at the moment. Is this true? Can you elaborate?

CH: I cannot address that question at this time. (ghostly sounds accompany this statement...ooooooo, OOOOOOOOO!)
AN: Indeed, she does haunt that locale, and also the house where we were all born, which is now a butcher's shop. Many have reported seeing her likeness in a cut of loin. (laughs)
EM: Yes, I have even heard tell that the visage in the meat shares the same facial tick she had when living. (all but Charlotte crack up) It scares people as much as Bertha Mason, the insane Creole wife of Mr. Rochester, did in Jane Eyre! (more laughter from all but Charlotte, who looks dour and continues her ghostly moaning.)

Charlotte, the novel you were working on at the time of your death was titled Emma. As a well-read woman of the mid 18th century you must have read Jane Austen's book by the same name, published a year before your birth. WTF? Good thing you died when you did, because otherwise generations of English Literature classes would be left in confusion. Can you speak on that?

CH: I see no offense in having two novels of the same name! Indeed, Emma is a common enough name in England, particularly among the upper classes. I believed my Emma would significantly differ from the high society Emma Woodhouse of Jane Austen\'s book. And besides, we Brontes went on to show the world that Britain can produce more than one authoress of quality- it can produce four! That\'s if you choose to count my sisters among that number. Perhaps the English Literature students of the ages would do well to be a bit confused, for they can\'t always have everything handed to them on a silver platter and if they cannot keep two characters of the same name separate in their minds perhaps they are not as sharp as one would initially think. And I do not appreciate your celebratory response to my time of death. I am a woman with high feelings as well, you know. Next time you eat pork loin look closely at the cut and see if you don\'t see a certain ghoulish matron twitching belligerently at you. (laugh hysterically)