The Brontes at Home:
WOLFE, ANN P.
The Brontes at Home The Letters of the Brontes. Ed. by Muriel Spark. Oklahoma. 208 pp. $3.75. Reviewed by Ann F. Wolfe Contributor, N. Y. "Times Book Review," "Saturday Review" NOWHERE is the...
...The widowed Reverend Patrick Bronte, with unimaginable crudeness...
...Seceding from the original quartet of child saga-makers, the inseparable pair find intense pleasure in their private Gondal cosmos...
...Teen-agers Emily and Anne joke about the good times they have in the kitchen helping with the cuisine...
...In 1855, a month before her death, Charlotte was writing from her sickbed: "Papa, thank God...
...proposes to the lady whom he had jilted for Maria Branwell...
...Life in the Spartan parsonage, these letters make clear, was neither altogether bleak nor lacking in quiet fun...
...Though Charlotte condescends toward Anne and underrates her work, the Cinderella of the Brontes emerges as the only one of the four children with enough staying power to keep to a job for years...
...Enigmatic, boyish Emily prefers domestic tasks to social amenities...
...The opening epistle, written to him in 1812, expressed Maria Branwell's "warmest esteem and regard" for the suitor whom she was soon addressing as "My Dear Saucy Pat...
...Son Branwell, who seems to have inherited his father's tactlessness and none of his stamina, plagues editors and famous writers with arrogant demands for attention...
...He cruelly blocked the courtship of the young curate who eventually married Charlotte...
...Throughout the decades of correspondence, sickness figures as a familiar in the household that was, in every sense, close neighbor to a graveyard...
...Reviewed by Ann F. Wolfe Contributor, N. Y. "Times Book Review," "Saturday Review" NOWHERE is the drama of the Brontes' story more poignantly rendered than in their own words...
...It is demon-correspondent Charlotte whose letters dominate the volume, reflecting her many-sided mentality and mirroring the personalities of her less articulate sisters...
...Yet, from this crotchety, ailing Irishman the Brontes got their love of learning and what Muriel Spark, in her excellent introduction, calls "the symbol of storm...
...Charlotte, the most nearly extroverted of the sisters, reports the news of the family and the nation, promotes schemes to ease parental financial stringency, and negotiates publication of the books that have made Bronte an enduring name in English letters...
...As the intervening letters disclose, all trace of Saucy Pat was lost in the eccentric Victorian paterfamilias who ruled his daughters with customary strictness and helped ruin the talented son who was the hope of the family...
...The long shadow of Patrick Bronte falls across the four decades covered by these letters...
...All in all, these letters, while not constituting an initiatory study, should companion even a beginner's collection of Bronte books...
...As for Charlotte's choice of George Sand over Jane Austen, it is easy to understand why the passionate daydreamer of the moor country would suffocate in the "elegant but confined houses" of Pride and Prejudice...
...This selection of 130 letters shows the development of the Brontes as a family entity and reveals the unique interplay of strong and disparate characters...
...Later, the unfortunate fellow begs a crony for a hooker of gin, a beverage alien indeed to the ascetic Haworth parsonage...
...In her nickname, "the Major," lies a hint of the homosexual characteristics which, according to Somerset Maugham, formed the unrecognized basis of her strangeness...
...is better...
...She refers, of course, to that Celtic obsession with the wilder forces of nature which, deepened by the loneliness of the Yorkshire moorland, was to cast the sisters' thought in somber mold and Gothicize the spirit of their novels...
Vol. 37 • December 1954 • No. 49
