Times Literary Supplement
FEBRUARY 13 2004
The Brontë menagerie
CHARLOTTE CORY
a review of : THE OXFORD COMPANION TO THE BRONTËS
by Christine Alexander and Margaret Smith
(640pp. Oxford University Press. £60 (US$95).
index
The Brontës have joined Shakespeare and Chaucer as the only authors thought
worthy of a full Oxford University Press devoted to their lives and writings.
This new 586-page, densely packaged encyclopedia contains in learned detail
everything anyone could ever want to know about the tragic lives of the scribbling
sisters, their dissolute poet-painter brother and eccentric Irish clergyman
father. Grasper, Keeper and Flossy, their favourite dogs; Tiger and Tom, the
Parsonage cats; Victoria and Adelaide, pet geese named after the Queen and her
aunt; and Nero, Emily Brontë’s hawk (for years referred to by misinformed
Brontë biographers as “Hero”) – all are accorded separate
biographical entries here. These creatures feature again in a comprehensive
overview “pets owned by the Brontës”, and again in “animals
and birds in the works of the Brontës”, where they are joined by
the likes of the fictional Tartar in Shirley, with all the creatures being amply
cross-referenced. The Companion also devotes six pages to “sequels and
‘incremental literature’”, from Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso
Sea to the saucy, postmodern Charlotte by D. M. Thomas, though this entry has
already been rendered incomplete by the recent publication of Clare Boylan’s
witty pastiche Emma Brown (2003), the latest attempt to complete the
two-chapter fragment left unfinished by Charlotte Brontë when she died
in pregnancy in 1855. (my own play, aired on BBC Radio 4 in July 2002: The
Day I Finished off Charlotte Bronte, starring Patricia Hodge, and also
completing the unfinished fragment, Emma, likewise gets no mention) The wide-ranging
account of “film adaptations and biographies” has also been overtaken
by events. Last autumn, we had scarcely recovered from a BBC two-part drama
about the family in which the distinguished Brontë biographer, Juliet Barker,
played a cameo role as Aunt Branwell), when news came of a forthcoming film
likely to eclipse all previous depictions in the family. Brontë, which
is due for release in 2005, has been developed by, among others, Steven Spielberg’s
Dreamworks.
Every generation retells its treasured stories in its own way.
There will always be new interpretations and theories, and the Companion is
good at debunking some of the wilder speculations about the Brontës. An
entry on “bed plays”, the childhood fictions Charlotte and Emily
created before going to sleep, cites Charlotte’s comment that “Bed
plays mean secret plays; they are very nice ones” as having “given
rise to speculation that they involved a sexual element. Their secrecy, however,
is more likely to relate to the exclusion of Branwell and Anne from these plays”.
The compilers’ dispassionate analysis of such material will provide a
much needed counterbalance to the often ludicrous fringe element of Brontë
studies which the family has always attracted and which was comprehensively
explored by Lucasta Miller in The Brontë Myth (2003).
One of the compilers of the Companion is an expert on Brontë
juvenilia and this probably accounts for the disproportionate amount of attention
paid to figments of the children’s imagination. Mr Lockwood, the narrator
of Wuthering Heights, for example, receives the same attention as Lord Macara
Lofty, in the succeeding entry. Lord Lofty is a character in High Life in Verdopolis,
a twenty-three-age novelette written by Charlotte Brontë at the age of
seventeen of which Christine Alexander has published an edition. My interest
in India makes me regret that, while the contribution of Africa as a source
of inspiration to the imagination of the young Brontës is explored in a
full-page entry, India is dismissed with a couple of cross-references. Charlotte
Brontë’s intense interest in the Duke of Wellington, whose exploits
in India she will certainly have followed, provided many names – such
as Seringapatam, the site of his first major military success – and much
exotic colour for her youthful dramas. The double-column six-page entry on Gondal,
the imaginative world created by Emily and Anne to rival the Glass Town and
Angrian sagas devised chiefly by Charlotte and Branwell, does not mention the
fact that Gondal is an ancient town (considerably larger than Keighley) in central
Gujarat, at the foot of the Manav Hills. I had hoped the Companion might have
located the particular issue of Blackwood’s, so beloved of the young Brontës,
from which Emily and Anne took the name. Anyone with a particular interest in
an aspect of the subject is bound to notice such omissions. What is surprising
is that, even now, despite the unstoppable tide of interest and ever-increasing
accumulation of factual knowledge about the Brontës, it is still very possible
to discover something new.
On
a trip to Bombay in September 2001, I tracked down an interesting bit player
in the Brontë story. On his way to India to set up a branch of the publishers
Smith Elder in Bombay, James Taylor called at Haworth and – as if in imitation
of St John Rivers’s proposal in Jane Eyre – asked Charlotte Brontë
to marry him and accompany him to India. She refused him but they maintained
a desultory, rather desperate long-distance correspondence over several years.
Taylor, who had married unhappily, died in 1874 in Bombay after tripping over
a mat in the billiard room of his club. His grave
is in the Sewree Christian Cemetery in north Bombay with a life-sized portrait
carved in a stone roundel on top of the gravestone, as I wrote in the TLS
of August 16, 2002, and as the Oxford Companion duly records. But, they
will have to update the entry.
I
was in Bombay again recently (March 2004) and visited St Thomas’s Cathedral.
As I stood chatting to some orphans who had been brought by the mother of their
orphanage to solicit alms from the congregation, I was delighted to spot a memorial
stone to James Taylor erected by the Chamber of Commerce “in acknowledgement
of his valued services which he served as secretary for nearly ten years from
September 1864 till his death at Bombay on the 29th April 1874”. The Companion
mentions Taylor’s “impressive funeral service in Bombay Cathedral”,
but the compilers could not know that there is a memorial stone commemorating
him placed quite prominently to the right of the doors in the inner front porchway.
It is published here for the first time. (It only occured to me afterwards that
the orphan girls were slightly Jane Eyrish, thus making the context in which
I spotted James Taylor's memorial highly appropriate)
It is a sad fact for the authors and publishers of this impressively
academic and comprehensive book that the extraordinary degree of interest in
everything to do with the Brontës will ensure that, even as it is published,
it is alas already out of date!
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