In Search of the Bronte Sisters

This article first appeared in the Age on March 5, 2005

One of the gems of this (and next week's) television has been tucked away by the ABC on Sunday at 2.00pm. In Search of the Bronte Sisters is a slightly odd mix of narration and reconstruction, but once you get used to it's style, the story of this talented family takes hold and, especially in next week's episode, provokes real grief. The catastrophe the family endured, and the loss of talent caused by their deaths, is tragic.

When Patrick Bronte was appointed the curate at Howarth, on the Yorkshire Moors, he arrived with his wife and six children. When his wife died in 1821 he became a single father of 6 children under 6 years of age. A combination of Patrick's eccentricities, the loss of their mother and the ensuing death of the two oldest sisters Maria and Elizabeth, isolation and the intensity of the little gang of remaining children formed the conditions for their fervent imaginations to flourish. That led, initially, to the imaginary kingdoms of Angria and Gondol, worlds all the children shared, to their more independent achievements: three novels, including two of the greatest novels in the English language: Emily's Wuthering Heights and Charlotte's Jane Eyre.

Ironically Patrick felt his son Branwell to be the true genius of the family - but while Branwell was highly creative he had fewer boundaries around the precocity all the siblings shared and, after an obsessive love affair, drank himself to death. Three months later consumption claimed Emily, the shyest Bronte, though the one with the wildest and most violent imagination. When consumption claimed Anne she chose to die by the sea that she loved rather than on the Moors. Charlotte survived longer; long enough to marry and experience the happiness of a love requited rather than the unrequited passion she had had for her French teacher, Monsieur Heget, who was the basis for the character of Rochester.

The narration, by Patricia Routledge seems quaint at first, and uses phrases like, 'Branwell and Mrs Robinson had grown perilous 'to describe that adulterous relationship. However the old-fashioned style captures the tenor of the world in which the Bronte's lived, a world that they battled with in ways that were surprisingly modern. Certainly many of the vagaries of publishing are still current - Emily and Anne sent a vanity publisher 50 pounds and heard no more. When Branwell proposed to make a living as a novelist, telling Charlotte that 'a novel is the most saleable item in the world,' she retorted, 'you are a fool. Find something sensible to do and stick to it.' Sound advice for writers today.

I felt a pang for my own days as a book publisher in the scene where Charlotte's publisher, George Smith, became the first person in the world to read that novel outside the family and recognized the talent he had before him. Charlotte would also be the only sister who was applauded in her own lifetime as once her sisters died she no longer felt obliged to use the pseudonym that Emily had insisted upon for all of them.

There is something very moving about lives lived in a world so constrained by class and geography that we would call them small. In some ways the documentary is reminiscent of SBS's wonderful The Writer of O, shown last night, in which the journalist, essayist and editor, Dominique Aury, a highly modest and reserved woman, allowed the erotic complexities of her imagination to flow onto the page. Aurey's life, like the Bronte's imaginary worlds was larger, fuller and more vivid than most people's lives will ever be.

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