"Heroes & Villains"
The novelist Charlotte Cory on the ‘awful truth’ about her villain,
Charlotte Brontë
Nowadays biographers are delighted when their heroes turn out to be villains,
but pity poor Elizabeth Gaskell back in 1856. When Mrs G discovered the awful
truth about her subject, she was too far on with her Life of Charlotte Brontë.
The only way to avert a scandal which would destroy the very Brontë industry
she was cashing in on was quickly to complete her whitewash job and get back
to novel-writing. Fiction is, after all, safer.
Or is it? In Charlotte Brontë’s murderous hands, fiction became a powerful weapon of character assassination, aimed with the accuracy of the deadliest Exocet. Vengeance is mine, clattered Miss Brontë, as she consigned her manuscripts to the Yorkshire post. Small, bespectacled, with bad teeth and a bad complexion, this overlooked spinster used her novels to get her own back. Publicly. Her strongest attacks on particular individuals are contained in Villette, the novel written when her literary reputation obliged her publisher to print whatever she wrote. How wicked, then, that one such act of revenge was directed against the publisher himself.
No one who read Villette in 1853 could have mistaken her portrait of a pampered, indulged son and his pampering, indulgent mamma for any other than George Smith (of the reputable publishing house Smith, Elder) and his mother. What crime had this pair perpetrated against Miss Brontë? Why, they had welcomed her into their home – introduced her to London’s literati, heaped presents on her, and taken her to the opera. Yet handsome, young Mr Smith had grievously offended. He’d failed to respond to CB’s complete lack of physical charms.
Charlotte Brontë was the sort of woman other women readily detect, the sort who throws herself at every man who comes into her orbit with a desperation and obviousness embarrassing to behold. As a governess she had been sullen, unprepossessing and obstreperous, the kind of au pair who falls in love with your husband, draping herself over him at every opportunity while openly disliking you and the children. Rather a pain, the real Jane Eyre.
George Smith and Mother came off relatively lightly – only fun was poked at them. Woe betide the beautiful women – the Blanche Ingramses and Ginerva Fanshawes – unfortunate enough to grace Charlotte’s books. And, had Miss Brontë been as vituperative about Jews as she was about Catholics and Belgians (“the phlegm that thickens their blood is too gluey to boil”), Post-Hitler’s England would have struck her off the A-level syllabus long ago. And if she’d written Villette today, she would have found herself in the High Court facing massive libel damages.
She had spent a year in Brussels teaching English and learning French, and had fallen unrequitedly in love with Monsieur Constantin Heger, her headmistress’s husband. Though Charlotte parted with the Hegers on friendly enough terms, once back in Haworth her infatuation grew unchecked. Over a period of two years she wrote this happily married father of five a series of increasingly passionate letters. When he did not reply, she directed the full force of her hatred against his wife. By teasingly substituting “Villette” for Brussels and a whole set of names for other locations, Charlotte Brontë actively invited readers to puzzle out the true identities of her subjects. The respectable Madame Heger, whose school was accurately pinpointed, not only had to endure the devastation of being caricatured as the monstrous Madame Beck, but also found clamorous hordes of Brontë-lovers beating a path to her door. No wonder she refused to see Mrs Gaskell.
Monsieur Heger, immortalised in Villette as a romantic hero, received the mild-mannered biographer politely. He showed her Charlotte’s letters, and she – whose sympathies, like ours, had been hijacked by the sad story of Charlotte’s life – was shocked to realise what a vicious piece of writing Villette was, and what a nasty piece of work Miss Charlotte. For everyone’s sake she agreed to gloss over the truth. But the Brontë industry need have no fear: who today would prefer the whitewashed heroine discreetly purveyed by Mrs G to the real villain that was Charlotte Brontë – bitchy, bigoted, vengeful and morally perverse?