Charlotte alone at Haworth

Some books are finished in companionship and some in solitude, but a rare few are finished in a room that has been emptied of every reader the writer ever trusted. The pages that come out of such a room carry the shape of the absence, and the work of the writer is no longer to invent but to keep the hand moving across paper that no familiar voice will ever again answer.

THE PARSONAGE BEFORE

Charlotte Brontë was the eldest surviving daughter of an Irish curate who had walked himself out of Drumballyroney into Cambridge and from Cambridge into the perpetual curacy of Haworth, a wool-town pitched along the lip of the West Riding moor. Six children were born to him and to Maria Branwell of Penzance. Maria and Elizabeth, the two oldest girls, were sent to the Clergy Daughters' School at Cowan Bridge and came home in 1825 to die. That left Charlotte, Branwell, Emily, Anne. They were raised on the moor, on Blackwood's, on the toy soldiers their father brought up from Leeds, and on the habit, fixed early, of writing in concert. Angria for Charlotte and Branwell, Gondal for Emily and Anne, four imaginations braided together at one table in one room. The room was the dining-room of the parsonage. The table was small. The custom, kept from about 1825, was that after tea the sisters walked round and round it, reading aloud what they had written that day, and quarrelling about it, and altering it, while Branwell drank himself to ruin in the public house at the bottom of the lane.

THE EIGHT MONTHS

Branwell died upstairs in the back bedroom on the twenty-fourth of September 1848, in his thirty-first year, of consumption hastened by drink and opium. Emily caught cold at his funeral, refused every doctor, and died on the horsehair sofa in the dining-room on the nineteenth of December, aged thirty. Anne, the gentlest of them, asked in the spring to be taken to Scarborough to see the sea. Charlotte took her. Anne died there on the twenty-eighth of May 1849 in lodgings on the cliff above the bay, and Charlotte, unable to bear the thought of carrying her north over the moor in a coffin, buried her in St Mary's churchyard above the sands. Three coffins in eight months. Charlotte came back to Haworth alone in the second week of June.

THE ROOM ON THE ELEVENTH OF JUNE

It is the dining-room she has known for twenty-four years. Three chairs at the small table. The two black horsehair sofas, one of them Emily's. The writing-desk against the wall, the side-table where the family Bible used to lie. The fire is laid. Beyond the wall her father is at evening prayers in his seventy-second year; beyond the kitchen the old servant Tabby is washing up; the curate Mr Nicholls, who will marry her in five years and bury her in six, is somewhere about the village. The manuscript of Shirley, begun before the deaths and abandoned at Scarborough, lies on the writing-desk. She has not opened it in a fortnight. She sits down at the table where, by her own later phrase to Mrs Gaskell, the sisters had been used to pace up and down the sitting-room. There is no-one to pace with.

THE HINGE

Twenty-four years of evenings made the table what it was, and one evening will decide whether it stays a table or becomes a grave. She can leave the parsonage. Her publisher George Smith would house her in London; the Kay-Shuttleworths have already offered Gawthorpe; there are governess places to be had still. She can keep the room shut and write at her father's desk. She can give up the book. The book is half-done and the half that is done was read aloud, here, to Emily and Anne, who corrected her, who told her Caroline Helstone was thin, who told her the Yorkshire was right. To open the manuscript on this table is to read what three readers read and to write on after them with no reader at all. She thinks of Anne in the cliff-top ground at Scarborough, with the sea coming in below; she thinks of Emily on the sofa at her left elbow, refusing the doctor to the last; she thinks of Branwell shouting in the name of God in the back bedroom. The book has been written through their deaths and it cannot now be written away from them. She thinks: if I do not finish it in this room I will never finish anything. The manuscript is on the desk and the desk is six paces off. She rises. She crosses to the side-table. She takes the manuscript. She comes back. She sits in her own old place, on Emily's sofa side, and she reads what she wrote before September, and what she wrote between September and December, and what she wrote between December and May, and she takes up the pen.

THE WRITING

From that evening on she wrote at the dining-room table, alone, every evening. To W. S. Williams at Smith Elder she wrote in the same month, labour must be the cure, not sympathy. To George Smith on the twenty-first of August she reported the book all but done. Shirley was finished on the twenty-ninth of August 1849, ten weeks after Anne's burial, and published by Smith Elder in October over the name Currer Bell. The reviewers, who now knew Currer Bell was a woman, complained the book was diffuse where Jane Eyre had been tight; the joins are visible, the deaths show in the prose. What is in Shirley that is not in Jane Eyre is the patient weather of moor and mill, the small turns of West Riding speech, the figure of the curate Macarthey, and a hundred small attentions that read as the writing of a woman trying to keep three other listeners in the room.

THE AFTERMATH AT THE TABLE

She wrote Villette, the masterpiece, at the same table, in 1852, alone. In June 1854 she married her father's curate Arthur Bell Nicholls in Haworth church, against Patrick's first refusal and with his late consent. She conceived almost at once, fell ill of relentless sickness in November, was bedridden through the winter, and died on the morning of the thirty-first of March 1855, three weeks short of her thirty-ninth birthday. Her last recorded words, to Nicholls bending over the bed, were Oh, I am not going to die, am I? He will not separate us, we have been so happy. She was buried in the family vault under Haworth church with Branwell and Emily, with Maria and Elizabeth from Cowan Bridge, with their mother from Penzance. Anne, alone of them, lies in Scarborough. Patrick outlived all six of his children and died in the parsonage in 1861, ninety years old.

RETURN

Some books survive their writers and some rooms survive their books. The dining-room is still there, at the head of the lane in Haworth, with the small table and the two black horsehair sofas, one of them the one Emily died on. The custom the sisters kept, of walking round and round the table after tea reading aloud what they had written that day, lasted from about 1825 to 1849, and is, by the museum's own account, the thing the visitors most often, looking at the table now, stop and ask the guides about.