the eldest sister, Charlotte Brontë – her shoes, her muslin dress, her gloves – and feels moved, but also a little disturbed. ‘The natural fate of such things is to die before the body that wore them,’ she writes, ‘and because these, trifling and transient though they are, have survived, Charlotte Brontë the woman comes to life, and one forgets the chiefly memorable fact that she was a great writer.’ Over 150 years after Charlotte Brontë’s death, and over a hundred years after Woolf’s visit, I peered through the same glass pane at the dull-coloured dress with its impossibly narrow waist; the pair of miniature, battered leather slippers (the great writer was, apparently, physically very small); the stockings, delicately unmentioned by Woolf, which looked like a snake’s shed skin. For a moment I felt connected to both these writers through the trivial nineteenth-century objects that had survived both of them and would, presumably, survive me. I burst into tears. Then I realised that I was in public, and I was crying over some socks.
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Even today, Charlotte Brontë is something other and more than the writer of four more-or-lessextraordinary novels, some middling poetry and a huge amount of overheated, soap-operatic juvenilia about a made-up African country (yes, really). She is a literary icon – a kind of shared cultural shorthand, as well as, alongside her sisters Anne and Emily, a brand that can sell anything from biscuits to vampire novels to bottled water. In present-day British culture, perhaps only Charles Dickens and Jane Austen have the same level of name recognition. Brontë’s and Austen’s names are often mentioned in the same contexts – great women in literature, great writers of romantic fiction, subjects of BBC miniseries, faces and quotations printed on tea-towels, coffee mugs and gift books. (In her Guardian article on Brontë’s posthumous reputation, ‘Reader, I shagged him’, Tanya Gold is particularly annoyed about the mouse mats on sale at the parsonage, which are printed with Jane Eyre’s cry that she is a free
The Haworth Parsonage, also known as the Brontë Parsonage Museum, in the village of Haworth in West Yorkshire in England (©NTBscanpix)
human being and not a bird to be ensnared: ‘In Jane Eyre, Charlotte wrote “independent human being”. She did not write “independent mouse mat”.’) But the two authors are just as often contrasted with each other, filling two different slots marked ‘female literary genius’ in our cultural imagination: Austen is the well-mannered, ironic, wry one; Brontë the morbid, solitary, passionate one. Austen is teacups and quadrilles; Brontë is windswept moors and violent embraces. Indeed, Brontë herself played into these stereotypes in her famous criticism of Austen: ‘The passions are perfectly unknown to her; she rejects even a speaking acquaintance with that stormy sisterhood ... [She] was a complete and most sensible lady, but a very incomplete and rather insensible (not senseless) woman’. Does Charlotte Brontë’s status as a pop-cultural icon illustrate her actual achievements, or does it just obscure them? Woolf suggests the latter when she says that ‘we forget ... that she was a great writer’ among the relics and souvenirs at
Brontë’s homeplace, and Tanya Gold describes stalking balefully around Haworth, dreaming of burning this Brontë ‘death cult’ to the ground and leaving only a copy of Jane Eyre smoldering in the ashes. So should we try to explode the Brontë myth, with its merchandise, its tweeness, its reinterpretations and misinterpretations of her work – or can it, after all, be something to be celebrated? Mythical status came early to Charlotte Brontë. There is something fairy tale-like about her story: she was one of three sisters who lived secluded lives in a little parsonage on the Yorkshire moors. They looked after their alcoholic brother Branwell, and left home only to endure several miserable stints of governessing and teaching. (At one point Charlotte wrote in her diary that she felt like vomiting on an importunate student who had shaken her out of her imaginative trance.) They tried unsuccessfully to set up a school, which they saw as a more reasonable ambition than writing. And in between all this, they wrote