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Charlotte Bronte: A Passionate Life At nineteen, Lyndall Gordon writes, Charlotte Bronte took a position as a teacher at Roe Head, the small girls school where she had been a pupil herself some years before. She had liked going to the school, but she hated teaching there. The students repelled her as coarse, unimaginative, and snobbish, and she was kept busy seven days a week. Still for three years she stuck with it, convinced that, as a good daughter, she must sacrifice herself for her family, especially since her brother Branwell was going to study art at the Royal Academy in London. Only a mental breakdown finally served to deliver her from the miserable situation. Throughout this dreary time, she found relief in what she called "making out:" entranced retreats into those imaginary and, as Charlotte partly thought them, infernal worlds that she and her siblings had conceived in childhood. She also took solace in her journal, where she recorded both her fantasies and her humiliations. Here, at the end of one long day in 1836, she notes with bitter precision, "7:00: I now assume my own thoughts." The tone of the remark is unusual, not only by contrast to the morose and obsessive material around it, but in its own right. It is at once detached and terse, resigned and rebellious. Charlotte stands apart from herself and her circumstances; she sees how even her thoughts have succumbed to the destructive daily routine, so much so that they can hardly be said to be hers anymore. her mind no longer feels her own. At the same time, however, her very consciousness of subjugation argues her stubborn refusal to submit. As Lyndall Gordon points out in her astute new biography of Charlotte, it was the elusive tone heard in such passing remarks that was eventually to become a voice in the pages of Jane Eyre. In that great novel, published pseudonymously but subtitled, with Kierkegaardian subtlety, "an autobiography," Charlotte transformed the miserable displacement she had felt at Roe Head, and would in various ways always continue to feel, into the creative principle that would drive her life's work. Gordon sees Jane Eyre as a pilgrim's progress for women-- the heroine is beset by alternate temptations of self-destructive rebellion and slavish obedience, from which, however, she emerges at last as her own and everywoman's woman. Gordon spares us, mercifully, the exhaustive survey of every vital, and not so vital, statistic that fills up so many biographies these days; she makes, indeed, a point of how much is and must remain unknown about Charlotte, many of whose letters and personal documents were destroyed by family and friends concerned to preserve her reputation from any hint of irregularity. She wants to rescue Charlotte from just these devoted attentions, to expose the myth of her meekness and long-sufferingness promoted so memorably by Mrs. Gaskell in her classic biography and, as she admits, in part by Charlotte herself. Charlotte was an uncertain and inconsistent advocate of women's rights, but Gordon treats her as a precursor of and continuing inspiration to modern feminism. Through her imaginative exploration and definition of women's inner states, she showed the richness of life and feeling in the corners to which women have traditionally been confined, gave voice to the unspoken, and bore witness to the overlooked. In doing so, she anticipated and gave heart to such later explorers and shapers of women's consciousness as Virginia Woolf. For all that, Gordon doesn't neglect the Victorian reality of Charlotte's situation and sentiments. Charlotte was the most conventional of the Bronte sisters and possessed what can now seem the equally insupportable virtues and vices of her time. Maddeningly self-sacrificing, she proved a good submissive daughter and, for a little while at the end of her life, a stereotypic good wife. At the same time, she could protest vehemently against women's subservience to men ("the coarser sex") and aspired to and of course succeeded in being known for her own achievements. But then she was uncomfortable with her fame, which did little to diminish her preoccupation with the looks she lacked or her always touchy, and sometimes bigoted, sense of social distinction. None of this is to condemn her: her conventional yearnings didn't narrow her fictional responses so much as complicate them, making her at once a wonderful romancer and an acute social critic. "The shadow of despair and stagnation was also the shadow in which her mind moved," Gordon writes. Charlotte's very intimacy with abasement and even degradation sharpened her imagination. Gordon has a clear, uncondescending appreciation of the possibilities as well as limits of women's and men's lives and understandings in the last century. Her book is distinguished by a psychological discrimination happily free of the psychoanalytic platitudes that are grist to the mill of so many biographers. Without second-guessing or bringing up mother and father, she discusses Charlotte's hopeless infatuation with her Belgian instructor, M. Heger, and tentative courtship of her publisher, George Smith, and manages to do justice to the complexity and obscurity of both her and their feelings. Gordon's eagerness to convince the reader of the extraordinary moral coherence and purposefulness of Charlotte's life can lead her to minimize its ambivalences and inconsistencies: at times, her picture of Charlotte as a model woman is, if anything, even more marked than Mrs. Gaskell's by the need to display her better self, to make her presentable. To that extent, Charlotte's final retreat into subservient marriage inevitably leaves Gordon somewhat at a loss. To her credit, however, she says as much and remains, as ever, appropriately respectful of her subject's integrity. ** Gordon has written an often persuasive, admirably generous account of Charlotte Bronte's life. Occasionally, it seems too brightly enthusiastic, but that only serves to bring out all the more distinctly the darker, but finally more realistic, understanding of her situation that Charlotte herself certainly had. Lucy Snowe, the heroine of VILLETTE, remarks, "We shall and must break bounds at intervals, despite the terrible vengeance that awaits our return." Charlotte's determination was as much in returning within as in breaking out of bounds. She sustained the contradictions she was born to, and that struggle filled up and exhausted her life -- one that, finally and unforgettably, could only take form in fiction. Edwin Frank is co-founder of Alef Books, a small press devoted to poetry and works in translation. His poems and reviews have appeared in THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS, AGNI, PUBLISHER'S WEEKLY, SAN FRANCISCO REVIEW OF BOOKS, and elsewhere.
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