The brutal Brontes! Emily beat up her pet dog. Charlotte - plain, toothless and dull - was so spiteful children threw stones at her
- The Brontes have been written about more than any other literary family
- They had many idiosyncrasies and rarely left their house
- Claire Harman captures how extraordinary the Brontes' story is
Book of the week
CHARLOTTE BRONTE: A LIFE
by Claire Harman
(Viking £25)
Although the Brontes have been written about more than any other literary family, it still comes as a shock to be reminded of just how weird they were.
Patrick Bronte - the father of Charlotte, Emily, Anne and their dissolute brother Branwell - may have been a priest, but he had such a low opinion of his fellow man that he carried a loaded pistol at all times.
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As arrogant as he was brutish, he refused to allow his children to eat meat because he thought it would make them soft.
Not surprisingly, the Brontes were not popular with neighbours - partly because of their bristlingly suspicious natures and partly because of the way they looked.
Almost everyone who ever met the sisters commented on how plain they were. Emily had a large protruding tooth, while Charlotte had hardly any teeth at all. Undersized and undernourished, she was described by her fellow novelist, Mrs Gaskell, as having a forehead that was 'square, broad and rather overhanging'. Somehow, the 'rather' makes it even worse.
As the Brontes spent most of their lives cloistered away in Haworth Parsonage, often in poor health, people have tended to assume they were as timid as they were retiring.
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Claire Harman's elegantly written, consistently perceptive new biography lays this theory firmly to rest.
On one occasion, the family dog, Keeper - a mastiff and a big one at that - dirtied a counterpane with his muddy paws. When Emily heard about this, she punched Keeper in the face, not just once, but so often that he was left 'half blind and stupefied'.
While not as combustible as Emily, Charlotte wasn't to be trifled with either. When she taught at a girls' school in Brussels, she gave any pupil who displeased her a tremendous tongue-lashing.
'If those girls knew how I loathed their company, they would not seek mine as much as they do,' she wrote in her journal.
Charlotte Bronte, above, taught at a girls' school in Brussels but was not popular as a teacher
In fact, several of her pupils seemed to have loathed her as much as she loathed them - one even threw a stone at her.
As children, the Brontes lived in their own fantasy world, making up stories which they recited to one another.
It tells you a lot about how wrapped up they were in these fantasies that their collected juvenilia far exceeds their published works. Apart from taking long walks on the Yorkshire moors, they seldom went out - the family never owned a horse or a carriage.
As Harman shows, all of them were wedded to Haworth, however grim the place was. Whenever they went away, they effectively fell apart.
Along with their mother, who died when Charlotte was five, two older sisters also died in childhood, and the spectre of mortality hung constantly over their heads. The loss of her mother seemed to affect Charlotte even more than the others - it can hardly be a coincidence that all her fictional heroines are motherless.
To begin with, though, there was little indication that Charlotte would ever write a novel, let alone one as powerful as Jane Eyre.
At school, her English was considered indifferent and she appeared to be less imaginative than her sisters. But an unrequited love affair with the married headmaster of the school in Brussels unlocked her creatively - or so Harman plausibly argues.
It's possible, too, that Charlotte was taking quite a lot of opium at the time. She wrote vividly and erotically about the 'bright dreams' she had started having.
However unprepossessing Charlotte may have been in the flesh, she clearly didn't strike everyone that way. Within the space of five months, she had two marriage proposals, both of which she turned down.
Instead, she returned to Haworth, writing away at the dining room table with Emily and Anne.
Their first published work was a joint book of poems in which they gave themselves the androgynous aliases of Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. The book was much admired by Florence Nightingale, who was read extracts from it by one of her suitors - not that it stopped her from refusing him.
An illustration of the Bronte sisters Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte and Anne Bronte
When Charlotte sent the manuscript of Jane Eyre to their publisher - again under the alias Currer Bell - he was so engrossed that he cancelled all his engagements.
The book caused an immediate sensation; nothing like it had ever been seen before. Apart from anything else, it was the first novel to have a first-person child narrator.
Queen Victoria found it 'intensely interesting' and even Charlotte's father was impressed. 'Better than I had expected,' he commented grudgingly.
By contrast, Emily's novel, Wuthering Heights, was given an almost unanimous thumbs-down by the critics when it was published two months later.
The revelation that Currer Bell was a woman - it didn't take long for the news to leak out - caused another sensation. 'Boys! I have been dining with Jane Eyre,' the novelist William Thackeray wrote excitedly to friends.
But literary success was quickly followed by disaster. Within a year and a half, Branwell, Emily and Anne had all died - Branwell of drink and Emily and Anne of TB. Emily was so thin when she died that her coffin was only 16 in wide.
All this time, Patrick Bronte's curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls, had been helplessly in love with Charlotte, but was too nervous to declare himself.
Nicholls seems to have been easily moved to tears - Patrick Bronte dismissed him as 'an unmanly driveller'.
Finally, though, he summoned the nerve to propose. Charlotte's acceptance was prompted largely by a desire to escape her father, but to her surprise the marriage proved very happy.
After becoming pregnant, Charlotte was laid low with hyperemesis gravidarum, an extreme reaction of the hormones to pregnancy - the condition Kate Middleton suffered with.
Bedridden and in agony, she soon went downhill. She died, along with her unborn baby, on March 31, 1855, three weeks short of her 39th birthday.
One of the virtues of this biography is that it doesn't beat its chest and make grand claims about having uncovered new material. The ground has been so extensively raked that there's little chance of that.
Instead, Claire Harman calmly and persuasively shows how it was the very drabness of Charlotte's day-to-day existence that sent her imagination soaring to wild extremes. She also succeeds in bringing Charlotte back to life in all her spiky vulnerability.
Among the photographs in the book is one taken on 1928 - the day the Haworth Parsonage opened as the Bronte Museum. The street is crammed with hundreds of people eagerly waiting to be admitted.
Somehow, it encapsulates just how extraordinary the Brontes' story is. In life, people hurried away whenever they saw them coming; in death, they beat a path to their door.
