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Authors: Catherine Reef
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reciprocations which I had little looked for.” Mr. Robinson learned of the affair and fired the guilty tutor.
Feeling wronged more than ashamed, Branwell drank away his sorrow in taverns night after night, or sought peace through opium. He begged money from his family, raged against his fate, and became more than flesh and blood could bear. “No one in the housecould have rest,” Charlotte complained. Hoping to restore Branwell’s mind and healthy habits, the Brontës sent him off with his friend John Brown to Liverpool and the Welsh coast. The change of scene may have helped Branwell control his outbursts, but he complained that wherever he went, “a certain womanrobed in black, and calling herself ‘MISERY,’ walked by my side, and leant on my arm as affectionately as if she were my legal wife.”
Emily and Anne found some calm by taking a short train trip to the city of York. Twenty-seven and twenty-five years old, they still loved to lose themselves in Gondal fantasies. Emily wrote in a diary paper:
During our excursion
we were, Ronald Macalgin, Henry Angora, Juliet Angusteena, Rosabella Esmaldan, Ella and Julian Egremont, Catharine Navarre, and Cordelia Fitzaphnold, escaping from the palaces of instruction to join the Royalists who are hard driven at present by the victorious Republicans.
To Charlotte, who was secretly dealing with her own impossible love, life in the parsonage was depressing. Again Mary Taylor urged her to get away. “I told her very warmlythat she ought not to stay at home,” Mary said, “that to spend the next five years at home, in solitude and weak health, would ruin her.” Mary had left the German school and was soon to sail to the other side of the world, to the young British colony of New Zealand. A book for new settlers claimed that no place on Earth offered “a more promising careerof usefulness to those who labour in the cause of human improvement, than the islands of New Zealand.” It sounded like just the place for a purposeful woman like Mary Taylor.
Mary Taylor sailed to Wellington, New Zealand, which in the 1840s was a small coastal town like this one. Women enjoyed more opportunities in such a young society than they did in England. In 1850 Mary and her cousin Ellen Taylor opened a shop selling draperies, dress fabrics, small toys, and other English goods. Ellen died in 1851, and Mary carried on the business alone.
Even with a wide world to live in, Charlotte stubbornly told her adventurous friend, “I intend to stay.”She hung her hope on Monsieur’s words, so when he failed to write, she simply had to break the six-months rule and send him a letter. “You showed me oncea
little
interest, when I was your pupil in Brussels, and I hold to the maintenance of that
little
interest—I hold to it as I would hold on to life,” she wrote. “If my master withdraws his friendship from me entirely I shall be altogether without hope.”
Charlotte tried to restore the old closeness she had enjoyed with her teacher, but such desperate words caused Constantin Heger to draw away. At last, hearing nothing to cheer her heart, Charlotte gave up. Wishing no longer to be “the slave of a regret,of a memory; the slave of a fixed and dominant idea which controls the mind,” she cut her ties with the Pensionnat Heger in November 1845. Haworth became her world.
The Reverend Brontë still ministered to the little village, but his vision was failing. He depended on his daughters to read and write for him and to guide him as he walked in the street. The new curate who arrived in 1845 took over many of his pastoral duties. Handsome Arthur Bell Nicholls, age twenty-seven, came from Ireland. He was the son of a poor farmer, like Patrick Brontë, but after his parents died he was adopted by his uncle, who was headmaster at one of Ireland’s best boys’ schools. He was more serious and plodding than the charming William Weightman, but the Brontës liked him well enough.
Feeling wronged more than ashamed, Branwell drank away his sorrow in taverns night after night, or sought peace through opium. He begged money from his family, raged against his fate, and became more than flesh and blood could bear. “No one in the housecould have rest,” Charlotte complained. Hoping to restore Branwell’s mind and healthy habits, the Brontës sent him off with his friend John Brown to Liverpool and the Welsh coast. The change of scene may have helped Branwell control his outbursts, but he complained that wherever he went, “a certain womanrobed in black, and calling herself ‘MISERY,’ walked by my side, and leant on my arm as affectionately as if she were my legal wife.”
Emily and Anne found some calm by taking a short train trip to the city of York. Twenty-seven and twenty-five years old, they still loved to lose themselves in Gondal fantasies. Emily wrote in a diary paper:
During our excursion
we were, Ronald Macalgin, Henry Angora, Juliet Angusteena, Rosabella Esmaldan, Ella and Julian Egremont, Catharine Navarre, and Cordelia Fitzaphnold, escaping from the palaces of instruction to join the Royalists who are hard driven at present by the victorious Republicans.
To Charlotte, who was secretly dealing with her own impossible love, life in the parsonage was depressing. Again Mary Taylor urged her to get away. “I told her very warmlythat she ought not to stay at home,” Mary said, “that to spend the next five years at home, in solitude and weak health, would ruin her.” Mary had left the German school and was soon to sail to the other side of the world, to the young British colony of New Zealand. A book for new settlers claimed that no place on Earth offered “a more promising careerof usefulness to those who labour in the cause of human improvement, than the islands of New Zealand.” It sounded like just the place for a purposeful woman like Mary Taylor.
Mary Taylor sailed to Wellington, New Zealand, which in the 1840s was a small coastal town like this one. Women enjoyed more opportunities in such a young society than they did in England. In 1850 Mary and her cousin Ellen Taylor opened a shop selling draperies, dress fabrics, small toys, and other English goods. Ellen died in 1851, and Mary carried on the business alone.
Even with a wide world to live in, Charlotte stubbornly told her adventurous friend, “I intend to stay.”She hung her hope on Monsieur’s words, so when he failed to write, she simply had to break the six-months rule and send him a letter. “You showed me oncea
little
interest, when I was your pupil in Brussels, and I hold to the maintenance of that
little
interest—I hold to it as I would hold on to life,” she wrote. “If my master withdraws his friendship from me entirely I shall be altogether without hope.”
Charlotte tried to restore the old closeness she had enjoyed with her teacher, but such desperate words caused Constantin Heger to draw away. At last, hearing nothing to cheer her heart, Charlotte gave up. Wishing no longer to be “the slave of a regret,of a memory; the slave of a fixed and dominant idea which controls the mind,” she cut her ties with the Pensionnat Heger in November 1845. Haworth became her world.
The Reverend Brontë still ministered to the little village, but his vision was failing. He depended on his daughters to read and write for him and to guide him as he walked in the street. The new curate who arrived in 1845 took over many of his pastoral duties. Handsome Arthur Bell Nicholls, age twenty-seven, came from Ireland. He was the son of a poor farmer, like Patrick Brontë, but after his parents died he was adopted by his uncle, who was headmaster at one of Ireland’s best boys’ schools. He was more serious and plodding than the charming William Weightman, but the Brontës liked him well enough.
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