Charlotte Bronte's secret loves

Three proposals, two passionate affairs of the heart, including one with a married father of six – the greatest love story Charlotte Brontë never told was her own. Her secret life is revealed by Sarah Freeman in this extract from her new book.

Charlotte Bront wanted desperately to believe that brains were more important than beauty. Yet whenever she looked in the mirror or caught a glimpse of herself in one of the windows of her home, in Haworth parsonage, she couldn't help but feel disappointed.

She was short. Her lips were too small. Her head was far too big for her thin body. As for her hair, when curled, it looked dry and frizzy; when left to its own devices, it sat limply round her bony shoulders.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

Charlotte was her own harshest critic. Her heart beat more passionately than anyone she had ever known, but she felt trapped within the plainest of exteriors. Blind to her simple, understated beauty, she spent much of her life wishing to be different.

For Charlotte, her appearance was a constant reminder of the unfairness of real life, and from the earliest age it forced a retreat into imaginary worlds where the heart always ruled the head and where those who loved passionately almost always triumphed.

These were worlds unpolluted by industrial chimneys which belched out smoke and noxious gases; worlds where beauty wasn't a prerequisite to success, and where love conquered all.

Most of those who found themselves invited into the Haworth parsonage, with its bare sandstone floors and grey painted walls, would have found little to hold their interest for long. It was, to all but the most careful observer, the kind of existence where each day was the same as the next and where life brought few surprises.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

Visitors may have caught a glimpse of the local art tutor hired to instruct the Bront children in painting and drawing. They may have heard musical scales being practised on the small piano or seen Patrick Bront, a man whose own humble beginnings had shown him the value of education, teaching his children the basics of maths and geography.

But when formal lessons were over, Charlotte, her two younger sisters, Emily and Anne, and brother Branwell reached for one of the many books which lined the shelves on either side of the dining room fireplace. Almost immediately, their otherwise grey world was transformed.

Turning the pages of Paradise Lost and The Pilgrim's Progress, the four surviving Bront children discovered lands much brighter and more optimistic than the one which lay outside their own front door. It was little wonder Charlotte craved a world of exciting possibilities, where happy endings could be delivered at a stroke of a pen and where old enemies could be dispatched with similar efficiency.

Outside the parsonage, the grim reality of life in a textile town may have been all too evident, but inside, the collective daydreams of the Bront family took them to lands where no-one needed to scratch a living combing wool and where mortality statistics were unimportant.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

Charlotte's imagination was awakened, and whenever the door was closed to both the elements and the steady stream of visiting clergymen and parishioners, the rooms of Haworth parsonage became populated by heroes who always got their way and heroines who, more often than not, were happy to comply.

While their father was occupied in his study, Charlotte, Emily, Branwell and Anne found an outlet for their smouldering imaginations. Away from the prying eyes of the practical and the pragmatic, together they wrote countless adventures about the exploits of great soldiers and their vicious enemies. They plotted battles, dished out cruel revenge, and Charlotte sketched out the rules of romance which would govern much of the rest of her life.

Writing in the tiniest of handwriting and read by no-one else but her three siblings, she found a freedom which real life was unlikely ever to offer a 4ft 9in, short-sighted daughter of a humble cleric.

Inspired by the likes of the irrepressible Lord Byron, the romanticism of William Wordsworth and the stories she had read about the Duke of Wellington, the military statesman who had defeated Napoleon in the Battle of Waterloo, her early fairytales soon turned into torrid romances. Behind her plain clothes, the teenage Charlotte was just waking up, and her hopes and dreams became embodied in the swashbuckling rogues and temptresses who lived in the imaginary world she called Angria.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

Of all the characters Charlotte brought to life, the Duke of Zamorna, the ultimate embodiment of raw machismo, revealed the most about her burning passion. Zamorna was cruel. He was masterful. He was domineering. He also had two wives, an illegitimate child, numerous mistresses and lived a life full of political intrigue and bloody feuds.

Few would have suspected the girl who every night dutifully knelt down to say her prayers and who spent Sunday mornings, head bowed, in the pews of Haworth church, listening to her father preach about moral goodness, could have been capable of such graphic portrayals.

This erotic and passionate world was as real to Charlotte as the stone walls of the parsonage, and it was one over which she crucially had

complete control.

To her father, the hours Charlotte spent crouched over her journals were nothing more than a sign of a creative mind occupying itself.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

Had he ever bothered to decipher the miniature script, he would have discovered a girl whose heart was already on fire; a hopeless romantic who refused to let reality temper her idealism.

For the most part, Charlotte kept her romantic notions to herself, well aware, perhaps, her fantasies would be dismissed as the silly daydreams of a young girl who knew no better.

However, unbeknown to everyone besides her brothers and sisters, Charlotte was leading a dangerous double life, her shy smile hiding a multitude of emotions which the well-bred but poor were not supposed to feel.

As Charlotte passed through her teens and into her twenties, her romantic view of life refused to be confined to the secret pages of her journals.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

While other women of her age and class were resigned to bowing to the wishes of fathers, brothers and husbands, Charlotte wanted none of it. While the men of Haworth hadn't exactly fallen at the feet of the parson's daughter; there were offers which others, less resolute in the belief and pursuit of true love, would have happily embraced.

Shortly before her twenty-third birthday, Charlotte received her first proposal of marriage. It was a joyless affair, for, sadly, Henry Nussey wasn't cut from the same romantic cloth as his intended.

The brother of Charlotte's friend, Ellen, Henry had recently graduated from Cambridge University and had found himself as a curate in Sussex in desperate need of a wife. The two had met a number of times when Charlotte had visited the Nussey family home. However, his presence had never added to the real joy of seeing Ellen, and the little she had gleaned about him through their unmemorable conversations had done nothing to improve her opinion

of him.

Henry didn't know an awful lot about Charlotte either, but this wasn't intended to be a lavish proposal or a heart-rending confession of just how much he loved her. No, Henry was a conventional man and he formally set down his intentions in a brief letter.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

Knowing Charlotte was unlikely to be inundated with offers, his proposal may have been bland, it may have lacked the customary flattery, but, nevertheless, it was, he told himself, a good one. Certainly it was a passport to financial security, and for the very first time Charlotte, who had talked so long of the necessity of true love and the irrelevance of marriage without it, had to put her romantic principles to the test. They passed easily.

"I am not the serious grave, cool-headed individual you suppose," she wrote immediately back to Henry.

"You would think me romantic and eccentric; you would say I was satirical and severe. However, I scorn deceit; and I will never for the sake of attaining the distinction of matrimony and escaping the stigma of an old maid, take a worthy man whom I am conscious I can not render happy."

Charlotte's incisive rejection of Henry was typical of her forthright style. She wanted her own Duke of Zamorna to sweep her off her feet, and if true love wasn't a possibility, she would rather have nothing at all, and she desperately tried to settle back into the usual routine of daily life. It was not easy.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

She had now spent two years as a teacher at Roe Head and its demands had already proved unbearable. She despised many of the pupils and the dour classroom sapped the very soul and life from her. Charlotte longed for adventure, but could see only a life of grim monotony ahead. Without some major changes, the future looked as bleak as the recent past and there was a living breathing example of the damage lack of direction could do close by.

Her brother, Branwell, whose artistic and literary talents the family had all prized, was already showing their faith might have been misplaced. His letters to the editor of the literary journal, Blackwood's Magazine, all but demanding his work be published, had come to nothing. Despite initial enthusiasm, dreams of securing a place on a fine art course at the Royal Academy had remained unfulfilled, and his liking for the Black Bull pub was growing.

Meanwhile, Charlotte could see her two younger sisters, Emily and Anne, would likely follow in her own depressing footsteps. The real world was closing in and she was sure all three would soon be teaching more children who didn't want to learn. The plan, at first, was vague, but was fleshed out largely by Charlotte – the three of them would start their own school. If Charlotte was going to be forced to become a teacher, at least she would be a teacher in charge of her own destiny. Charlotte and her sisters would need to broaden their horizons. They would need at the very least a basic knowledge of French and German. What better way than on the Continent?

"I feel an absolute conviction, that if this advantage were allowed us, it would be the making of us for life," Charlotte wrote to her aunt, asking for money to fund the trip. "Papa will perhaps think it a wild and ambitious scheme; but who ever rose in the world without ambition."

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

It was agreed. Anne, who was already working as a teacher at Roe Head, would stay on in Yorkshire, while Charlotte and Emily would head across the Channel.

The Pensionnat Heger, in Brussels, came recommended and Charlotte, now 25, had much cause to pinch herself. Here, finally, was the chance for the freedom she had so long craved. While she didn't know it yet, in Brussels her all-consuming passion would finally find a target.

Hundreds of miles away from the places and people with whom she had grown up, Charlotte's romantic childhood dreams would be reignited. They would not be extinguished until June 29, 1854, when, after three proposals and two passionate affairs, she walked into her father's church, in Haworth, and of her own free will married a man she didn't love.

Extract from Bront in Love by Sarah Freeman. Great Northern Books, ISBN 9781905080700. To order a signed copy, visit www.greatnorthernbooks.co.uk or call 01274 735056. Yorkshire Post readers save 2 on Bront in Love, price 12.99 (RRP 14.99). To order your copy or treat a friend, ring our order line 01748 821122, Mon-Sat 9am-5pm. Or by post, please send cheque/postal order for 12.99 plus 2.75 p&p made payable to Yorkshire Books Ltd. Send to

Yorkshire Books Ltd, 1 Castle Hill, Richmond DL10 4QP.

YP MAG 28/8/10