Brontë · 1849
Charlotte alone at Haworth
Branwell Brontë died at the parsonage on the twenty-fourth of September 1848. Emily died on the nineteenth of December 1848. Anne died on the twenty-eighth of May 1849 at Scarborough on a sea-trip Charlotte had taken her on in the hope of saving her. By June 1849 Charlotte was the only one of the four Brontë children left in the parsonage, with the father, the elderly servant Tabby, and a curate she would later marry. She sat down at the dining-room table where she and her sisters had walked round and round in the evenings reading their work to each other, and tried to begin *Shirley*. The novel, which she had started before the deaths, was the first piece of writing she had to finish in a room where no other Brontë would ever read a sentence of it again. She finished it. She finished *Villette* after it. She married Arthur Bell Nicholls in 1854 and died in childbed in March 1855, the last of them, aged thirty-eight.
It is the evening of the eleventh of June, 1849, in the dining-room of the parsonage at Haworth. The dining-room has three chairs at the table, two black horsehair sofas, the writing-desk, a side-table where the family Bible used to be open and is no longer. The fire is laid for evening. There is no-one in the room except her.
She is thirty-three years old. She is Charlotte Brontë, Currer Bell, author of Jane Eyre. She has been in the room with one or two of her sisters every evening of her life since she was a child. The pattern of the evening, the walking around the table after tea, the reading aloud, the arguing about each other's manuscripts, was as fixed as the prayers her father said next door.
The walking is what cannot be done alone. She has tried it. It does not work alone.
Branwell died in this house in the upstairs back-bedroom on the twenty-fourth of September. Emily died on the dining-room sofa, the one beside her left elbow as she sits, on the nineteenth of December. Anne, the gentlest of them, died on the twenty-eighth of May at Scarborough, in a sea-front hotel she had asked to be taken to because she had wanted to see the sea once more before, and she is buried in the cliff-top churchyard at St Mary's because Charlotte could not bear to bring her north over the moor in a coffin. Three burials in eight months.
She thinks: I am the only one of us. I am the eldest. I have buried all of them. My father is in the next room, in his seventy-second year, and he is now alone in the house with his last child.
She thinks: the manuscript of Shirley is on the desk. I have written through Branwell's death and through Emily's death and through Anne's death. I have not written since I came back from Scarborough. I have not written for a fortnight. I am sitting at this table because I cannot write at the desk.
She thinks: if I do not finish the book I will not write another book.
She thinks: the room is unbearable. The room has to be bearable. The book has to be finished in the room.
She gets up, by her own letter to her publisher George Smith two weeks later, and she goes to the side-table and she gets the manuscript and she brings it to the dining-room table and she sits down where she sat in the old life, on Emily's sofa side, and she reads what she has written before the deaths, and she reads what she has written between the deaths, and she takes the pen.
Shirley was finished on the twenty-ninth of August 1849, ten weeks after Anne's burial. It came out in October at Smith Elder. The reviewers, who by now knew that Currer Bell was a woman, complained that Shirley was diffuse and slack where Jane Eyre was tight. The complaints were partly fair; the structure of Shirley shows the breaks in its writing. What is in the book that is not in Jane Eyre is the long passage on the death of Caroline Helstone's prospects, the long passage on the curate Mr Macarthey, and a hundred small turns of moor and weather and Yorkshire dialect that read as if the writer is trying to keep three other readers in the room. Charlotte wrote Villette, the masterpiece, in 1853. She married her father's curate Arthur Bell Nicholls in June 1854. She conceived almost at once, fell ill of severe morning-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. She is buried in the family vault with Branwell and Emily; with Maria and Elizabeth, the two older sisters who had died at school in 1825; with their mother. Anne, alone, is in Scarborough. Patrick Brontë outlived all six of his children. He died in 1861, ninety years old, alone with the housekeeper, in the parsonage. The walking round the dining-room table after tea, in the parsonage at Haworth, was a Brontë custom that lasted from about 1825 to 1849 and is, by the museum's own description, the part of the parsonage's working day that the visitors most often, looking at the table now, ask the guides about.